Jose Iraola
Born: 1960
Hometown: Camagüey, Cuba
Lives and Works: Miami, FL
Website: http://joseiraola.com
Education:
San Alejandro National Academy of Art, Havana, Cuba
About The Artist
Though he began his art career in painting, once Jose Iraola encountered photography by chance, he never looked back. His two part series Memoria Televisia is highly personal: many of the images stem from his own Latin background and are taken from Spanish reality TV shows of questionable taste, while other images are informed by his passion for film. Iraola shot well-known moments in the history of American film and decontextualized them by including their corresponding English subtitles, resulting in work that takes on a completely different psycho-sexual meaning with humor and political commentary.
Just as he planned to record his love of gardening, Iraola's Canon digital camera broke. After attempting to fix the light sensor, he decided he liked the resulting images. He had formed layers of vibrant colors, deformed shapes, and lush textures. "I noticed there was this distortion. Pictorial in nature and almost like a painting," he says. "Control was the challenge." So commenced a body of work called Florilegio, a compilation of southern Florida flowers in Iraola's backyard in Miami's Coconut Grove.
Select Permanent Collections
Molaa Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA
Ellipse Foundation, Cascais, Portugal
JPMorganChase Art Collection, New York, NY
Antioch University, Los Angeles, CA
Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT
Museo Municipal de Arte, Guayaquil, Ecuador
Museo de Arte Moderno, Cuenca, Ecuador
Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, Lima, Peru
Diners Club, Quito, Ecuador
Works by the Artist
