José Lerma

Almine Rech London is delighted to present José Lerma's first solo show in London and second solo show with the gallery.

José Lerma’s recent hyper-painterly portraits are paradoxically austere. The copious amount of paint loaded onto each canvas counters the scant number of brushstrokes: only three to ten per piece. Though impasto typically conveys dynamism and spontaneity, here it rigidly describes static heads from the front or side. Stark and solemn, the faces in profile evoke Piero della Francesca’s classicizing double portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. Only in place of the early Renaissance master’s diaphanous oil glazes is the opposite extreme: clotted slabs of acrylic. With so few marks and fast-drying paint thickened with gels and other materials, Lerma’s pictures require careful planning. This methodical process and the profound quietude of the resulting images neutralizes the improvisational bravura associated with gestural brushwork. Beyond the unlikely marriage of seductive expressionism and severe neoclassicism, the series contains many more contradictions that challenge expectations of both painting and portraits.

—Antonia Pocock, independent scholar

José Lerma (b.1971) lives and works in Puerto Rico.

Lerma is a multimedia artist who works primarily in portraiture. Lerma’s practice is most responsive to not only the social and material con-ditions of the cities he inhabits, but also to the works of art put on display by their institutions. He has described his practice as akin to that of a landscape painter, turning his eye into a sieve able to distill and record telling details about worlds physically proximate to him. Of particular interest to Lerma is art history, and how artistic representation produces social and political power. His recent suite of portraits is known for its rejection of character psychology and its distinctively haptic materiality, produced with a custom-mixed acrylic paint that allows for a signature impasto.Lerma is currently an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has taught since 2009. He has had over twenty solo exhibitions at galleries such as Kavi Gupta in Chicago, IL (2020, 2017, 2014), Galerie Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, NY (2014, 2010, 2006, 2004), and at museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2014), and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2013) His works are represented in numerous collections, including The Saatchi Collection in London, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.