FREDRIC SNITZER GALLERY NOW REPRESENTS RAFAEL FERRER
Working in just about every medium, including sculpture, performance, painting, printing, and installation, the course of Rafael Ferrer's (b. 1933, Santurce, Puerto Rico) artistic development defies categorization and moves beyond the significant art movements of the 20th century—Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Performance Art, Conceptual Art, and large-scale, figurative painting.
Ferrer's oeuvre is grounded in a language that reflects the Caribbean landscape's multiple ethnicities and cultural experiences. From corrugated tin to paper bags and traditional wood to calabashes, Ferrer's iconography celebrates the brutal and magical reality of a place without fixed borders, a place of transit, exchange and desire, and commodities and bodies that speak to the precariousness of the Caribbean economy.
Ferrer became internationally recognized for his participation in seminal post-minimalist exhibitions, such as Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1969). Ferrer was the only Caribbean artist invited to participate in Information (1970), a landmark manifesto exhibition on Conceptualism at the Museum of Modern Art. Around the same time, he held a solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1970) and performed Deflected Fountain, an homage to Marcel Duchamp, in which he diverted the spray of an outdoor fountain at set times.
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Rafael Ferrer's work has been acquired by prominent private and public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany; The Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Museo de Ponce, Ponce, PR; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Instituto de Cultura Puertoriqueña, San Juan, PR; Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota, Colombia; Museo Del Barrio, New York, NY; and the Pasadena Museum, Pasadena, CA; among other.
