PAST EXHIBITION
Gladys Triana: A Path to Enlightenment (1971-2021)
Curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective
Sept. 24th, 2022 | Saint Joseph University Art Museum and Fairfield University Art Museum.
Gladys Triana: A Path to Enlightenment (1971-2021)
Gladys Triana is a Cuban-born, New York-based, multi-disciplinary artist whose work rebels against authoritarian rule and the oppression of hegemonies. For decades her immersive installations, sculptures, drawings, and paintings reflected two axes around which her life turned, and her art was nourished: her condition of having lived since 1969 in exile from her native island, and her stubborn, continuous exploration of the ontology of women. Her more recent videos and photographs reveal her discovery of an abstract language for transcendence. Curated by the Aluna Curatorial Collective, this exhibition, running simultaneously at two venues, includes works from the 1970s to the present.
What is abstraction made of in the painting of Gladys Triana (Cuba, b. 1937)? It’s made of her own body, of beloved bodies, of the bodies of women, of the very history of her island and that of our entire species. Torn fragments, small segments unwilling to offer any reference to their origin besides the slight curvature of the organic, are loaded with the memories of two currents that for many decades formed the axes around which her life turned, and her art was nourished: her condition of having lived since 1969 in exile from her native island, and her stubborn, continuous exploration of the ontology of women, so often lacerated by collective history, or by women themselves. Leaps and breaks result in an ascension from her art to the infinite.
Triana’s exhibitions, conceived in tandem, at Fairfield University and the University of Saint Joseph, propose a journey through an oeuvre marked by the body and the little objects that we use, by the biographical and the historical, but characterized above all by the ultimate experience of spiritual freedom.
