HEIDI HOWARD + ESTEBAN CABEZA DE BACA
VERANO
September 2 - November 25, 2017
Opening Reception September 2, 5 - 8pm
Gaa Gallery Wellfleet
Verano, a two-person exhibition of new paintings from Esteban Cabeza de Baca and Heidi Howard, was completed over the course of 2017, as the artists traveled between New York, NY; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Truro, Massachusetts; Venice, Italy; and Seville, Spain. Cabeza de Baca and Howard met as Columbia University graduate students in the fall of 2012, and since meeting, they have spent most of their time painting together.
Verano, Spanish for summer, is a sensorial meditation on the elliptical, lengthened days of the season. Panel by panel, Cabeza de Baca and Howard present varied captures of idyll: the paradisical dance of light on water; the human figure in languorous recline; the lushness of skies and grasses; the high color of European architectural facades. The paintings of Verano are a living, stylized study of place and time, of escape and companionship. In this archive of togetherness, Cabeza de Baca and Howard have created, via their distinct styles and gazes, a world of beauty informed by light, memory, and the imagination.
Heidi Howard (b.1986, New York, NY) is a painter based in Queens, New York, and Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her figurative work draws on the intimacies of friendship as a foundational element of her inventive paintings, which are characterized by loose, free strokes and detailed, staccato texture. A 2014 graduate of Columbia University’s Master of Fine Arts program, Howard has twice exhibited her work in solo exhibitions at Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York: the 2017 show Woven Traits, as well as Portrait and Dream. Additional group exhibitions include Spring 2017, Gaa Gallery Project Space, Cologne, Germany; Red Matters, Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ; Bomb Pop Up!, Brooklyn, NY; and Intimisms, James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY. Howard’s press includes The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Art F City, artcritical.com, and onverge.com.
Esteban Cabeza de Baca (b.1985, San Ysidro, CA) is an artist whose observational paintings are derived from dreams and shaped toward capturing and reimagining lost cultural histories. A recent Columbia University MFA graduate, Cabeza de Baca has completed residencies at the LMCC Workspace Program, New York, NY; the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, New York, NY; and a Byrdcliffe Residency, in Woodstock, NY. Recent group exhibitions include The Complexities of Unity, Yale University; Home/Not Home, Colorado Convention Center; The Narrative Figure, David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Scent, Dickinson Gallery, NY; and Manahatta TODAY, Leroy Neiman Art Center, New York, NY. . He currently lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands and Queens, NY. He is a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten.
