Organizer: Silverlens New York
Type/Location: In Person / New York, NY
Description:
This exhibition at Silverlens New York marks the first presentation devoted to the drawings of Carlos Villa and Leo Valledor. Long known for their monumental paintings, here the artists work up close. On paper, their ideas are immediate and unguarded, holding the DNA of their major works while making their kinship plain: two artists for whom artmaking was a form of thinking, and where experimentation was the real subject. A few master paintings accompany the works, extending that dialogue and pairing the iconic with the intimate.
Villa and Valledor belong to a generation of Filipino and Filipino American modernists that expanded what modernism could hold, alongside Pacita Abad, Imelda Cajipe Endaya, and Santiago Bose. For Villa, that meant ancestry and ritual. For Valledor, color as space.
Though their mature works diverged sharply, on paper their kinship becomes clear. Freed from material weight, the drawings catch thought in motion.
About the ArtistS:
Carlos Villa (b. 1936 - d. 2013, San Francisco, USA) was a San Francisco-born visual artist, grass-roots activist, curator, author, and educator for over 40 years at the San Francisco Art Institute, among other Bay Area institutions
In 2022, Villa received the first-ever major museum retrospective dedicated to the work of a Filipino American artist, which toured from the Newark Museum of Art to the San Francisco Art Institute and Asian Art Museum. Villa’s works were also included in the 2011 solo retrospective Manongs, Some Doors and a Bouquet of Crates at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, and Other Sources: An American Essay, a multidisciplinary, multiethnic exhibition centered around women and artists of color, curated by Villa and presented in conjunction with the 1976 American Bicentennial.
Image: Family photos of Carlos Villa, courtesy the Estate of Carlos Villa and Silverlens, Manila and New York.
Leo Valledor (b. 1936 - d. 1989, San Francisco, USA) was a San Francisco-born, New York- based abstractionist and founding member of downtown Manhattan’s trailblazing Park Place Gallery, an artist collective and exhibition venue founded by ten emerging artists, many of whom are now recognized as among the most influential Modernists in American history.
Valledor’s strong understanding of color optics, geometric planes and dimensional illusion combined with shaped canvases to engage the viewing space in powerful ways. Influenced by luminaries such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, Valledor’s work resonated with the color- field and minimalist aesthetics, distinguished by his inventive manipulation of space, shape, and color.
Valledor’s artistic legacy continues to reverberate through collections nationwide, with works in prominent collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Leo Valledor’s work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
Image: Leo Valledor with his painting ‘Echo’ (for John Coltrane), 1967. Park Place, The Gallery of Art Research, Inc. records and Paula Cooper Gallery records, 1961-2006. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Registration:
The gallery is free and open to the public. Registration is not required.