Bandini Baker, The Spanish Sindicate Abraham Lacalle & Miki Leal Poster

MIKI LEAL & ABRAHAM LACALLE:
BANDINI BAKER: THE SPANISH SYNDICATE

Curated by Kevin Power
October 22–November 19, 2011

Track 16 Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition MIKI LEAL & ABRAHAM LACALLE: BANDINI BAKER: THE SPANISH SYNDICATE curated by Kevin Power. The exhibition will run from October 22 through November 19, 2011.

Miki Leal (Sevilla, 1974) has shown widely, both in Europe and Latin America, and this year he won the prize for the most promising young Spanish artist. His work, usually on paper and often large-scale in size, is characterized by a lyric inventiveness. He exploits both narrative possibilities and immediate sensations. He sets up potential plots for a story line and then perversely upsets them, leaving the spectator the task of constructing meaning from a series of fragments that refuse to settle on a single reading. Leal is particularly interested in cinema, architecture, jazz, design, and retro imagery. Los Angeles provides him with a playground that he can explore, from Hollywood Cinema to Chet Baker, from 50s aesthetics to palm trees.

Abraham Lacalle (Almeria, 1962) works with Marborough Gallery and has shown extensively from the early nineties onwards. His painting is driven by a hedonist pleasure and a need for direct expression - forceful, energetic, and frontal. They show a tendency towards abstraction but are full of figurative elements, often superimposed, and held in place by an architecture of primary colors. Lacalle has also over the last four or five years returned to “comic-style” narration in a language that has attracted him since childhood but that he had not intended to show. He is an avid reader of contemporary fiction. In a show at the Malba, Buenos aires he used Cormac McCarthy, Jim Thompson and Philip K.Dick as his push off points, and for this exhibition at Track 16, has turned to John Fante and Thomas Pynchon.

Poster, 26.75 x 38.5 inches, 2011