MOTHER’S MILK

KEVIN UMAÑA

EXHIBITION DATES:
NOVEMBER 7 - DECEMBER 21, 2024

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present Mother’s Dream, a solo exhibition of hybrid and tablet paintings by New York based artist Kevin Umaña.

Umaña’s “hybrid paintings” combine glazed ceramics on painted canvas and fuse together conflicting styles—mess and order, biomorphic and geometric, thin and thick, symmetries and asymmetries, matte and sheen. Influenced by Indigenous traditions, the complex cultural landscape of Latin America, the natural environment and memories shared with his mother, this new series of paintings marks a dramatic shift away from his pure, non-objective geometric abstraction to a practice more deeply rooted in personal history, cultural identity, and mysticism.

For Umaña, abstraction has been a way to explore the tranquility of nature, and search for an equilibrium between the capacity as a creator and the energy of the world around. “I spent my first few years in El Salvador. In the streams, surrounded by the fields. There, it seemed, was abundance. Abundance of color. Abundance of texture. I did not forget those features when I was brought to the city (Los Angeles). And in some ways, you could say I am still trying to immortalize them so as not to forget them.” Mother’s Dream is a collection of dreamscapes, meditations and reflections that draw inspiration from the teeming natural world – spider webs, the colors and patterns of birds, the symmetries of the flora and fauna, the materiality of clay and the earth. Umaña’s raw, textural glazed ceramics on painted canvas weave together a beautiful and unique visual language, replete with bold color, dynamic gestures, and expressive marks that evoke the mysticism of nature and the artist’s deep connection with its healing power and peacefulness.

The paintings also tell stories about spiritual and literal migrations. “For centuries, birds have been considered spiritual messengers from the universe or a higher spiritual being. Their messages bring clarity and guidance to those who seek it.” Like birds and their movement, people have always moved around the world, bringing their traditions, knowledge and beliefs with them. While individuals often absorb the culture of their new home, they also influence it with their own traditions. Recently, Umaña has been investigating the history of the Pipil people, the indigenous group his family derives from. These new explorations have had a profound impact on Umaña and marked a major turning point in his life and art. He’s not only found art an “essential instrument for gestural expression but a science hidden within the artwork that reflects spirituality.” His fragmented abstractions subtly overlay influences of indigenous and pre-Columbian textile traditions, Christian stained glass and illuminations, devotional art, and the singular power of clay to communicate profound stories about the land itself. Each painting offers a kind of dispersal that connects the fragments of Umana’s life and how he has experienced the world while simultaneously transferring images, disseminating ideas, and sharing impressions with the world.

Kevin Umaña was born in 1989 and grew up in El Salvador and Los Angeles. He received a BFA from San Francisco State University in 2014 and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has completed residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (2024); Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2023-24); Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, Helena, MT (2023); The Center for Book Arts, New York (2019); Plop Residency, London, England (2018); and SIM Residency, Reykjavik, Iceland (2018). His work was featured in “Pattern Recognition,” curated by Amy Lincoln at Sperone Westwater in 2022. Institutions owning his work include The United Nations Art Collection, New York; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Munson, Utica, NY; Fidelity Mutual Funds Collection; Center for Book Arts Library, New York; and The Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Novato, CA.

For more information, please contact the gallery at info@romeryounggallery.com or 415.550.7483.