With a five-decade long career, Rocío García’s (b. Cuba, 1955) voice is one of the most
coherent, iconic, and universal languages of the contemporary art scene in Cuba. Her debut exhibition
at Thomas Nickles Project, Bellas Flores del Mal, showcasing a total of nine never-before-seen paintings,
continues her voracious exploration of all that it means to be human.
Through scenes of secretly evolving intrigues, obscure mysteries, and unknown intimate stories, Rocío
examines power, love, desire, sexuality, and violence with a focus on the double-edged subtlety in the
conception of love: the sublime and the sinister. A rekindling of a series begun in 2017 as an homage to
Matisse, the painter explains that “at the end of 2020, when the world seemed transformed by the virus,
the spell began. Someone very important came into my life and I felt again intensely that duality that
determines us in the face of the transcendent. The feeling that people, humanity, are bent on destroying
the beauty.”
The union of opposites—the sacred and the demonic—and the duality of beauty are the central impulses
of the works in this exhibition. The artist’s lifelong passion for painting, drawing and storytelling and the
seamless synthesis of her influences are on display in portrayals of the dangers of love and the magic of
flirtation. Here, the line, the monochromatic provocation, the disregard for naturalism, the scene-based
nature, the voyeurism and ultimately, the passion are in full bloom.
Her characters are metaphors more than stereotypes that judged at face value, represent an exercise of
personal search, the long arms of all that can be, the dream of not being beholden to a singular identity,
the ultimate freedom to be, to love and to be loved in return. Rocío’s painting remains there, in that non-
place, in Augé’s space of anonymity: in the dark corners of a bar, in hotel rooms, on the unstable limits
of gender, sex and love, eternally transient, free of the constraints of history, relationships and identity.
Bellas Flores del Mal
Exhibition Details:
Dates: Sep 22 – Nov 21, 2021
Opening Party: Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 5 – 8pm
Hours: Tues – Sun 11am – 6pm, Thurs 11am – 7pm
Thomas Nickles Project presents Bellas Flores del Mal.
The first solo exhibition in New York by Cuban painter
Rocío García.
Lluvia Azul (Blue Rain), 2021
Oil on canvas / 70.8” x 74.8”
Image courtesy of the artist and Thomas Nickles Project
47 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002 | 917-667-5016 | [email protected]
Rocío García in her Havana studio, June 2021
The artist’s lifelong passion for painting, drawing, and storytelling and the seamless synthesis of her influences are on display in portrayals of the dangers of love and the magic of flirtation. Here, the line, the monochromatic provocation, the disregard for naturalism, the scene-based nature, the voyeurism and ultimately, the passion are in full bloom.
Rocío García (b. Santa Clara,Cuba, 1955) graduated from the San Alejandro School of Fine Arts in 1975 and began teaching there in 1984 after she received her MFA at the Repin Academy of Fine Arts in Leningrad, Soviet Union. She was an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center (2010), the University of Michigan (1997) and the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba in Basel, Switzerland (2007). Rocío’s work has been widely exhibited inside and outside Cuba, received multiple awards and is held in several private and public collections. With Rocío García, however, the best is always yet to come. The artist lives and works in Vedado, Havana, Cuba.
The exhibition will run through November 21, 2021, with an opening reception on the 22nd from 5-8pm.
The gallery is located at 47 Orchard Street, between Grand & Hester, and their website.
