Jose Bedia, George Adams Gallery, New York

Jose Bedia: Mi Essencialismo / My Essentialism
George Adams Gallery, New York
May 10 – June 7, 1996

George Adams Gallery presents Mi Esencialismo - My Essentialism, a new series of paintings and drawings by Jose Bedia. The exhibition was jointly organized by the George Adams Gallery, New York, the Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, and the Pori Art Museum, Pori, Finland. Mi Esencialismo is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays by Judith Bettelheim, Professor of Art at San Francisco State University, and Melissa Feldman, curator of the 1994 Jose Bedia survey exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Ten drawings and eight paintings from the series, as well as an installation created for the New York venue, are on view.

"Essentialism," writes Judith Bettelheim, "is most broadly understood as referring to a fixed aspect of a given entity." Which in ethnology translates as an immutable cultural characteristic. The anti-essentialist view, which Jose Bedia shares, holds that a culture is never pure, but is constantly altered through contact with other cultures. As Ms. Feldman points out, "through his knowledge of ethnology and extensive travel, Bedia has adopted a pancultural point of view which acknowledges a fundamental commonality among different belief systems." Jose Bedia, who is of mixed - Spanish and African - descent, was born in Cuba in 1960. At the core of his art is the language, imagery and beliefs of Santeria and Palo Monte, Afro-Cuban religions brought to Cuba during the 19th Century by slaves (the Kongo and the Yoruba of what is now Angola). Other significant influences are the Indians and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas, as well as artists as diverse as Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg and H.C. Westermann.

In this exhibition Jose Bedia presents two series of paintings and drawings that combine 19th Century photographs of the Kongo and of North American Indians with his own hand-rendered versions of the same image. Jose Bedia's re-rendered images are intended to present a non-Western viewpoint, supplying critical information that, as Melissa Feldman writes, "fills out the image to its full iconic potency." Jose Bedia's aim is not to deny the accuracy of the photograph, but to elucidate the additional layers of meaning in order to allow for a more sophisticated reading of the image or event depicted in the photograph.

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Updated 15.07.2019