FIRELEI BÁEZ
New York-based artist Firelei Báez has achieved wide acclaim for her paintings, drawings and immersive installations that explore the influences of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora against the backdrop of colonial histories and narratives.
This September, in her first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, Báez will present ambitious large-scale canvases, drawings and her first-ever bronze sculpture at the gallery’s Downtown Arts District complex. In vivid and richly layered works, Báez depicts fantastical figures and alternative worlds. Femme figurations entwine with verdant plant life, intricate hair arrangements and elaborate textile designs that overlay found historical documents. Báez’s exuberant paintings imagine new worlds and narratives, drawing on beauty to reprocess the effects of violence and trauma. Destabilizing the categories of gender, race and nationality, she consistently pushes the boundaries of established histories and knowledge. A wide range of disciplines and cultural references are incorporated into her work, including art history, science fiction, pop culture, anthropology, folklore and fantasy.
The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles coincides with two museum surveys, ‘Trust Memory Over History,’ at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg Germany (6 June – 13 October 2024) and ‘Firelei Báez,’ at Vancouver Art Gallery Canada (2 November 2024 – 16 March 2025), and follows the artist’s first UK exhibition ‘Sueño de la Madrugada (A Midnight’s Dream)’ at South London Gallery (28 June – 8 September 2024).
New York-based artist Firelei Báez casts diasporic histories into an imaginative realm, re-working visual references drawn from the past to explore new possibilities for the future. In exuberantly colorful works on paper and canvas, large-scale sculptures, and immersive installations, Báez combines representational cues that span from hair textures to textile patterns, plant life, folkloric and literary references, and wide-ranging emblems of healing and resistance. Often featuring strong female protagonists, Baez’s portraits incorporate the visual languages of regionally-specific mythology and ritual alongside those of science fiction and fantasy, to envision identities as unfixed, and inherited stories as perpetually-evolving. These empowered figures’ eyes most often engage directly with the viewer, asserting individuality and agency within their states of flux.