Angel Otero: That First Rain in May

Magical realism and abstraction converge in the work of artist Angel Otero, whose first Los Angeles exhibition with Hauser & Wirth will be on view at the gallery’s West Hollywood location beginning 29 May. Otero’s personal recollections of his upbringing in Puerto Rico are woven through this array of new paintings and sculptures.

Through a labor-intensive process of oil painting on plexiglass, then scraping the applied medium into ‘skins’ which he subsequently collages with wet paint onto canvas, Otero has developed a signature mode of expressive storytelling. The artist’s unique approach allows for an active exchange with the medium, inviting chance and unpredictability into his practice. In surreal and fragmentary scenes, Otero mines his personal history to make sense of the current moment, animating everyday objects and environments that are loosely based on the domestic spaces of his youth.

While Otero is best known as a painter, his exhibition at Hauser & Wirth marks the artist’s return to sculpture. Combining ceramics with welded metal, three new sculptural works on view evoke the mutable landscapes of childhood remembered. Their subject matter consists of identifiable objects that undergo transformation and reconstruction, creating uncanny new contexts. Otero’s playful reimagining of these artifacts and their associations is not dissimilar to the ways in which memory becomes distorted over time.