Firelei Báez
Installation view, Firelei Báez, 48 Walker St, March 5 - April 25, 2020
Installation view, Firelei Báez, 48 Walker St, March 5 - April 25, 2020
Installation view, Firelei Báez, 48 Walker St, March 5 - April 25, 2020
Installation view, Firelei Báez, 48 Walker St, March 5 - April 25, 2020
Installation view, Firelei Báez, 48 Walker St, March 5 - April 25, 2020
Installation view, Firelei Báez, 48 Walker St, March 5 - April 25, 2020
Installation view, Firelei Báez, 48 Walker St, March 5 - April 25, 2020
Installation view, Firelei Báez, 48 Walker St, March 5 - April 25, 2020
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Le Jeu du Monde)
2020
Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas
105 x 131 3/4 x 1 5/8 in.
266.7 x 334.5 x 4 cm
JCG11288
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Le Jeu du Monde)
2020
detail
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Le Jeu du Monde)
2020
detail
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Drexciya)
2020
Oil and acrylic on canvas
90 x 114 3/4 in.
228.6 x 291.5 cm
JCG11393
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Drexciya)
2020
detail
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Drexciya)
2020
detail
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Flow of merchandise in France on railways and waterways in the year 1856)
2020
Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas
78 x 60 5/8 in.
198.1 x 154 cm
JCG11292
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Flow of merchandise in France on railways and waterways in the year 1856)
2020
detail
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (A Correct Chart of Hispaniola with the Windward Passage)
2020
Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas
104 1/4 x 122 3/4 in.
264.8 x 311.8 cm
JCG11260
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (A Correct Chart of Hispaniola with the Windward Passage)
2020
detail
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Terra Nova)
2020
Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas
102 7/8 x 132 3/8 x 1 5/8 in.
261.1 x 336.1 x 4 cm
JCG11293
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Terra Nova)
2020
detail
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Terra Nova)
2020
detail
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Anacaona)
2020
Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas
96 3/8 x 127 3/8 in.
244.6 x 323.5 cm
JCG11257
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Anacaona)
2020
detail
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (United States Marine Hospital)
2019
Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas
100 x 127 1/2 x 1 3/4 in.
254 x 323.9 x 4.4 cm
JCG11077
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (United States Marine Hospital)
2019
detail
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Baubo)
2020
Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas
86 3/4 x 132 3/4 x 1 5/8 in.
220.3 x 337 x 4 cm
JCG11287
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Baubo)
2020
detail
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Untitled (Baubo)
2020
detail
James Cohan is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Firelei Báez, on view from March 5 through July 2 at 48 Walker Street. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with James Cohan.
To explore the exhibition in our Viewing Room, please click here.
Firelei Báez casts diasporic histories into an imaginative realm, re-working visual references drawn from the past to explore new possibilities for the future. Often depicting strong, shape-shifting female protagonists, her paintings incorporate motifs sourced from regional mythologies and historical artifacts alongside cues from science fiction and fantasy, to envision identities as unfixed, and inherited stories as perpetually-evolving.
Her second exhibition at James Cohan features new paintings in which figuration, symbolic imagery, and calligraphic gesture are overlaid onto large-scale reproductions of historical maps and documents. Driven by the migrant experience of navigating and articulating spaces that are both familiar and physically distant, Báez's new body of work is grounded in archival research into individual and collective modes of organizing space: the ways in which built infrastructure—and conceptions of place and community—reflect and reinforce social relations conditioned by gender, race, and class. For more than a decade, Báez has painted directly onto found cartographic or printed materials to disrupt the boundaries they serve to delineate. Questioning notions of past and present, mark-making and painterly gesture become means of situating subjugated personal memory and experience in dialogue with narratives of the Western tradition. The works in her exhibition carry forward this long-standing interest while upscaling source materials onto large-format canvas to allow for intervention in human-proportion.
Maps courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries.