Artmedia Gallery is pleased to present Rolando Peña's exhibition A Matter of Perspective, concentrated on a segment of the artist's varied artistic production from the first decades of his trajectory, the 60s and 70s of the XX century. Contemporary works related to the early ones accompany them to extend their concepts and possibilities as ongoing works in progress.

The show focuses on performance art as the practice that crosses and mixes with other Peña's art practices, including his use of photographs. It is worth noting that this exhibition displays only one way of approaching a long career characterized by imaginative inquiries and many achievements. With his sixty years of artistic activity behind him, Rolando Peña continues to be a contemporary artist whose early production arouses questions that interest and affect current viewers.

The exhibit groups different works based on exploring two resources of human representation: one, the photographic portrait produced when using the photo-booth called photomaton; and another, the mirror as a device of reproduction of the self. The exhibition's departing point is the series Photomatons, developed by Peña from 1960 to 1969 but taken up later occasionally until the present.

The self or duo Peña's photomaton portraits were also incorporated by Peña, joining the illustrations of Hans Vredeman de Vries's book Perspective, from 1605, in the series of photo-collages titled The Seven Vanishing Points, dated in 1979. But The Seven Vanishing Points is beside the title of a performance of the same year where the artist broke several mirrors: an action related to the exhibition of the collages mentioned above. Furthermore, broken mirrors are the components of Behind my Eyes, a contemporary polyptych dated 2021 that proposes an interpretation of the performance we commented on before. As we can see, a Peña's proposal is connected to another in a chain that has, as a first commitment, the exploration of the self from different points of view: art history, cultural traditions, social contexts, psychological stances, and feelings.

About the artist

Born in Venezuela in 1942, Rolando Peña, also called El Príncipe Negro, contributed to the definition of contemporary Latin-American art in the 1960s and the 1970s, when living in New York. He has exhibited internationally and received different awards. He exhibited at the Venice Biennial in 2008 and was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. An artist who practices various art media, Peña also made creative use of photomaton photography early in his career. A Matter of Perspective is his first exhibition at ArtMedia Gallery.

About the curator

Cuban-born, José Antonio Navarrete lives and works in Miami, FL. He is a critic, researcher, and independent curator of art and visual culture. His last published book was Escribiendo sobre fotografía en América Latina. Antología de textos 1925-1970, edited by Centro de Fotografía, Montevideo, in 2018. In 2019, the Cuban Legacy Gallery at MDC College exhibited his curatorial project Remaking Miami. Josefina Tarafa’s Photographs of the 1970s. He has contributed texts to numerous books, including Alejandro C. Del Conte. Memorias de un soñador, published in Buenos Aires in 2021.

About the gallery

Artmedia Gallery was founded in 2012. With a location in Little River, Miami, Florida, the gallery has the mission to exhibit and promote contemporary art based on photography and video practices. One of the gallery’s central objectives is to explore the vast possibilities of the expanded notion of art through media technology.