Mira, 2024

CANDIDA ALVAREZ
Mira, 2024
22.75 x 17.5 inches
11 color Silkscreen print on 290gm Coventry Rag paper
Limited edition of 5 Hand-Embellished Prints
Limited edition of 20 Signed and numbered prints with 5 APs
All prints signed and numbered by the artist

Mira! Look here. Where do your eyes take you? Do you notice the colors? Do your eyes beg not to leave? Do you think of someone? Or do you smell a scent? Can we face a picture without memories? Are you startled, does it make you laugh, does it provoke a smile on your face? Ideas. evolve, like drawings. This work has a rather long trajectory, collapsing cities, continents, and oceans in its flatness, reviving memories buried deep within its layers. Color, as its passionate companion, keeps pace and lingers on the paper surface now living as a silkscreen. Note: five prints in the series have been hand-embellished with diamond dust leftover and collected from Andy Warhol’s factory, making each print unique. 

Candida Alvarez (b.1955, Brooklyn, NY) is an artist whose primary materials are painting and drawing. Alvarez composes her abstractions from a personal narrative beginning with a collage-like exchange creating a pictorial space that eventually results in several layers overlapping. Color becomes the pictorial architect between shape and line, and abstraction becomes a sense of wonder that tracks the formal invention and lives within Alvarez’s compositions. 

Alvarez received her MFA from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (1997) and taught painting at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago for 25 years where she is now Professor Emeriti. Her work has been exhibited at ICA Boston, Kemper Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, The High Museum of Art, Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, New Britain Museum of American Art, The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles,  moniquemeloche, Gavlak, and Galerie Lelong, among others. 

Her work has been collected and also exhibited by the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; Peréz Art Museum Miami; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; El Museo de Barrio; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Seattle Art Museum; and DePaul Art Museum. Recent awards and fellowships include the 2022 Ford Mellon Foundation Latinx Artist Fellowship, 2022 Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art, the Helen Frankenthaler Award for painting in 2021, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2019. In 2023, Alvarez was artist in residence at Studio of the South/ LUMA Foundation Arles, France and at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, ME.

This print is part of a suite of limited edition prints by a group of moniquemeloche artists commissioned on the occasion of EXPO Chicago 2024 in order to amplify the necessity and power of creativity in shaping inclusive civic discourse. Proceeds will benefit the artists and For Freedoms’ upcoming initiatives. 

PLEASE NOTE: 

• Unframed prints ship within 1-3 weeks and framed prints ship within 4-6 weeks.
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