DERRICK VELASQUEZ

GREATEST ATTEMPTS

SEPTEMBER 8 - OCTOBER 25, 2020

MEET THE ARTIST & GARDEN RECEPTION (Weather permitting)
Saturday, September 12 | Time slots: 4, 5, and 6 pm

Pentimenti Gallery welcomes our first exhibition of the fall season with Derrick Velasquez’s Greatest Attempts, the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.

Derrick Velasquez’s most recent work examines how our unwavering social and economic systems collapse, regroup, and reestablish themselves by creating a new reality. Our reconstructed use of time, connectivity to nature, and even indolence justify the present moment with whatever we were able to extract.

In Greatest Attempts, Velasquez presents painting, sculpture, video, and a new collage series Ornamented Void. In his new works on paper, Velasquez maneuvers sections of photographic imagery from European Baroque and Victorian architecture. This process allows him to exploit flat color fields to erase the visual weight of those structures. Still, the essential aesthetic of the sculptural space remains true to its original nature.

Derrick Velasquez reveals his first-ever painting series about the architecture of clothing from the seventeenth and eighteenth-century royalty and military commanders. Both architecture and architectural clothing of this time are much kindred to structure, durability, and depiction of hierarchy.

With his new works in both the architectural re-imaginings and the symmetrical and asymmetrical sculptures, he unleashes culturally recognized structures, objects, and materials from their typically assigned environments, as he seeks to give them new depths of significance.

Showing in our Project Room will be Velasquez’s video LUX. This time-based media is about losing touch in a time of faux luxury, hierarchy, isolation, and global pandemic.

Derrick Velasquez received his BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his MFA from Ohio State University. He exhibited his works at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum, Denver, CO; Herron School of Art and Design, Indianapolis, IN; Drexel University, Pearlstein Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Center for Visual Art, Denver, VAC University of Colorado, Boulder,  RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Denver, CO; FOCA Biennial, New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Arvada Center for the Arts, Arvada, CO; and more. He has been awarded by MacDowell Colony Fellow 2019; MassMoCA Assets for Artist Residency’18-’19; Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant 2017; Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum Artist Fellow 2015. His work is in the public collections of Temple University, Philadelphia, PA; Metropolitan State University of Denver, CO; Miami University, Oxford, OH; Colorado Convention Center, and in numerous private collections. Derrick Velasquez is represented by Pentimenti Gallery since 2012.

To ease concerns about COVID-19, we will be following strict social distancing protocols.
RSVPs are required and will allow guests to enjoy the "Meet The Artist" during a specific time slot, thereby allowing us to control the number of guests inside the gallery.

For all inquiries and RSVP, please contact us at mail@pentimenti.com or +1 215.625.9990.