Following Plazas Vacías in its Guayaquil space in 2021, N.A.S.A.L. is pleased to present La Piel by Miguel Andrade Valdez in Mexico City.
Miguel Andrade Valdez (b. 1979) is a Lima-based artist working across sculpture, design, and architecture. He holds a Fine Arts degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. His practice examines the urban landscape and vernacular monuments of Latin America, treating sculpture as a contemporary archaeology and architecture as a marker of time.
Through his studio and design collective Taller Tarapacá, he develops large-scale installations and cast-in-place concrete works that draw from modernist architecture and pre-Columbian huacas. His research-led practice often involves collaboration and construction processes. Andrade Valdez has participated in the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore residency (2017) and exhibited at MANA Contemporary (Jersey City) and the Museo Mario Testino in Lima.
" (...) It’s been a slow thematic movement, from the city and the empty streets of Lima during the Pandemic, the Ocean and Melville’s great whale, to home and family, and now back into the very physicality of being a human, into body and mind. For Miguel Andrade Valdez it has also been a move away from the white skies of Lima to the clear light of the Andes in the Sacred Valley in Peru. It’s a voyage back in time, to his beginning as a young painter. After having focused on sculpture and installations for many years, a return to painting and to figuration might come as a surprise but both have been present for some time in Andrade Valdez’s wall objects, such as variations of “Sad Face” and sculptures like “Falling Man”. In this group of work, figuration emerges in a series of large, white drawings on canvas, manifesting in fragmented bodies and landscapes, and in another series consisting of small jewel-like paintings, faces and eyes peer out from dense vegetation in greens and browns. The large drawings with motives such as “The Mountain, The Man and The Tree (Trunk)”, are archetypal symbols tattooed into the canvases, like all symbols their meaning reveals itself differently for each one of us. But we are all of this, bodily mess, emotional junk, brainy storms. (...) "
Exhibition text by Sofia Bertilsson
