Five reasons to collect Iván Navarro's work:
1. Artist Iván Navarro was born in Santiago, Chile in 1972 and grew up under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. This experience fuels his art practice, which is primarily characterized by sociopolitically charged text works that reflect on the trauma of Latin America’s recent histories, especially those marked by scars of fascism.
2. Often riffing on familiar objects, like chairs, doors, or billboards, Navarro repurposes familiar materials to comment on past events. The works on offer here, for example, combine activist posters with Snellen Eye Charts—a common clinical test to measure our abilities to see clearly.
3. These editions were printed this year with Polígrafa in Barcelona, a print shop founded in 1964 that, in its early years, published editions by artists who are today considered among the most influential of the 20th century: Joan Miró, Francis Bacon, Robert Motherwell, John Cage, Ed Ruscha, Alex Katz, and Helen Frankenthaler to name only a few.
4. Navarro represented Chile at the 53rd Venice Biennale. He’s held solo exhibitions at the Frost Museum of Art in Miami, SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, University of New Orleans Gallery, MACBA in Buenos Aires, and The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. He’s represented by Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York and Galerie Daniel Templon in Brussels.
5. Navarro currently has a solo exhibition entitled "This Land Is Your Land" at Navy Pier, Chicago, IL, originally installed ini Madison Square Park in New York in 2014. The installation is comprised of three sculptures that, with the use of neon and mirrors, look like infinite towers when viewed from below.
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