James Fuentes announces Juan Pablo Echeverri: Identidad Perdida, a solo exhibition in two parts presented in collaboration with Between Bridges, Berlin accompanied by a monographic publication on the artist by James Fuentes Press.
Juan Pablo Echeverri (1978-2022) is a renowned contemporary artist from Bogotá, Colombia whose prolific body of work can be read as a continual self-portrait in many parts. Translating to Lost Identity, the exhibition’s title is lifted from a handwritten note taped to the wall in Echeverri’s studio. The phrase resonates on a number of levels. Before his passing, much of Echeverri’s thinking was around challenging the flattened, essentialist reading of identity at play in today’s art world. In his characteristically playful, hyper-contemporary manner, Echeverri resisted the generalized insistence upon the performance of a “real” Latin American identity.
During his teens, Echeverri began experimenting with his appearance and, in turn, its documentation. The impulse would later crystallize in his seminal miss fotojapón series (1998-2022), a daily project of recording his likeness in a photo booth, resulting in a collection of over 8000 self-portraits. This ritual exercise ran parallel to more than 30 series of photography and video works that disclose the artist’s infatuation with the performativity of identity and fantasies of the self made possible in our photographic world. He describes these projects as “a series of beings that have been brought to life as a consequence of an exposure to icons, music, fashion, advertising, TV, films, and all the things we encounter on a daily basis.” The exhibition includes two panels of over 400 images each from miss fotojapón, each uniquely combined from the larger series, presented for the first time in New York at James Fuentes.
A selection from the artist’s Identidad Payasos (2017) double-portrait series expands upon Echeverri’s photographic languages through one of his most ambitious projects. This series of diptychs shows, on the left-hand side, a portrait of a street clown characteristic of Mexico City’s urban subcultures, who Echeverri in turn invited to transform into a copy of themselves; paired on the right-hand side with the resulting self-portrait of himself as payaso. Through this double-vision, using his own body Echeverri carries out a renewed multiplicity and refusal of rigid conformity. A selection of his home-made (from the early 2000s) and self-made music videos created wherever he traveled are presented as a reel in a dedicated downstairs gallery, the latter videos all belonging to his series Around the World in 80 Gays (2007-2015). These works show him dancing and lip-syncing to top-40 songs of the regions he visited as well as his self-produced Spanish and Gay versions of pop songs, and, most staggeringly in its gestural preciseness, presenting his craftsmanship of impersonating and inventing personas that allowed him to inhabit an endless plurality of positions.
James Fuentes | 55 Delancey Street
On View June 7-July 28, 2023
Opening June 7, 2023 | 6-8PM
