Miguel Aguirre

The series is composed of thirty-two oil on zinc portraits. They are part of Aguirre´s recent explorations on American Art History, especially the American abstraction that became one of the first movements that gained international recognition and gave visibility to New York as the world capital of art since the 1940´s. The portraits feature first and second generation artists that are known to be associated with American Abstract Expressionism.

For the portraits, Aguirre appropriates black and white photos of the painters found on the Internet and reproduces them on same-sized zinc sheets. The portraits depict a handful of well-known figures of the movement, while a majority of the artists may relatively be unknown to the general public. More than just an homage, this series tends to be a sort of critical analysis on the history of this movement and its formal achievements. By experiencing all of these portraits together, one has the sensation of being in front of a yearbook of sorts, which allows us to make some deductions of this class of artists, such as the fact that half of them were smokers, most of them are men, most of them are white, etc. However, a deeper analysis of all these figures you begin to understand that just a few of the artists in New York School were born in this state, and that most of them come from other states of the Union, or from Canada and Europe, following the tradition of diffusion that has characterized the development of culture in this city.