Hunter College East Harlem Gallery Presents JORGE PINEDA: SHADOWS AND OTHER FAIRY TALES, Now thru 12/28

The Hunter College East Harlem Art Gallery will present Jorge Pineda: Shadows and Other Fairy Tales from today, September 28 through December 28, 2012. The gallery is located in Hunter College's Lois V. and Samuel Silberman School of Social Work building at 2180 Third Avenue at 119th Street, Manhattan.

The first US solo exhibition of Dominican artist Jorge Pineda, Shadows and Other Fairy Tales, features two major art installations. The exhibition presents one of Pineda's most representative works to date, The Forest: Lies (Version III, 2006), a psychologically charged artwork characteristic of Pineda's blend of drawing and installation. Pineda has also conceived a new installation for this exhibition: Oh Taschen, Taschen, Taschen! Wild Girls Without a Mask (2012) composed of double portraits of ninety-three international women artists that uses Taschen's publication Women Artists of the 20th and 21st Century as a point of departure. The work is an inventory-like accumulation of portraits that juxtaposes drawings depicting the faces of each artist, and acrylic paintings of Lucha Libre masks that conform to the artists' features. The exhibition illustrates how the artist explores the psychological shaping of individuals and society, the interaction of the conscious and unconscious, and the interplay of visibility and concealment involved in this process.

Pineda belongs to the generation of Dominican installation artists who, toward the end of the 1980s and in the early '90s, transformed the artistic scene in Santo Domingo by broadening the range of themes and mediums of expression in Dominican art. He experiments with a variety of media, but it is his signature combination of drawing and installation that has gained him recognition in Spain and throughout the Americas. The Forest: Lies (Version III) is composed of dense, uncontrolled lines drawn vigorously directly on the wall, a mass that expands until it reaches the confines of the gallery space, ultimately revealing its root: A life-size sculpture of a child wearing a red hood, her face hidden against the wall.