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Art Thu Dec 10 2009
Angel Otero
Angel Otero is Chicago art's most precious baby bird. He graduated from SAIC with an MFA last spring, was released into the wild, and has since been included in the MCA's Constellation show and won a prestigious Leonore Annenberg Fellowship grant. He has a giant solo show coming up at the Cultural Center (opening January 29,) and his first solo show at Kavi Gupta Gallery opens this Saturday (December 12.)
His paintings are colorful and textural, oscillating between representation and abstraction. They often incorporate unusual elements like dried oil paint skins and lacy lines of silicone, somehow squeezed onto the canvas, resembling the decorative icing on a birthday cake. His work is deeply intuitive and often quite personal, reminisces of his childhood in Puerto Rico, beautiful amorphous glimmers of memories.
Otero has achieved impressive, yet well-deserved, notoriety for a painter who is not yet thirty. I look forward to growing up in the art world with him and watching his work evolve over the next few decades.