Art in the Age of Anxiety, is Luis Cruz Azaceta’s twelfth exhibition with the Arthur Roger Gallery, and features recent large-scale canvases completed in the artist’s distinctive graphic mode. The works on display are imbued with a vibrance and urgency inherent to Azaceta’s perennial exploration of the human condition, particularly as it exists amid constant change. Of the canvases on view, nearly all reference movement and transience, often featuring motifs including wheels, boats, troubled waters, and other icons alluding to the artist’s experience as a Cuban expat. This is the fulcrum from which Azaceta reflects on a variety of contemporary issues; namely widespread injustice and the mounting sense of dystopia it entails.
Azaceta has exhibited extensively both domestically and abroad, and has been awarded numerous awards, including grants from The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation. His work is represented in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of Art in New York, The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., Museo De Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela, Marco, and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo De Monterrey, Mexico among others. Originally born in Cuba, Luis Cruz Azaceta emigrated to New York at the age of 18 and has lived in New Orleans for over 30 years. He has been exhibiting his work at the Arthur Roger Gallery since the early ‘00’s.
