Puerto Rico-born Angel Otero’s oeuvre is characterised by an interest in personal history, expressionistic abstraction, and Spanish Baroque painterly traditions. Otero practises a process-based art combining painting and assemblage. ‘Oil skins’, created from paint poured onto glass and peeled off in sheets after drying, are grafted on to the artist’s canvas or sculpture in combination with other materials including resin, spray paint and silicone.
The paint, for Otero, becomes a signifier of chance and memory, alternating between lived experience and art history. Much of Otero’s early work was directly influenced by personal memories based on photographs and other family memorabilia combined with the gestural bravura of painters such as Nicolas Poussin, Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning.
Otero has been the subject of acclaimed solo exhibitions, including at Lehmann Maupin, New York (2021); Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2017); and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2016). The artist divides his time between Brooklyn and Chicago.