We are thrilled to welcome Felipe Baeza to the gallery and are proud to collaborate on a promising journey.
Fusing collage, painting, printmaking, and other techniques, Felipe Baeza creates multilayered, textural works exploring notions of the body to distort alternative modes of inhabiting. Baeza’s sensually rich and visually arresting works evoke both mythic dimensions and contemporary themes. He depicts figures within densely layered paintings, portraying them in different states of becoming and at times abstracting them to the point of invisibility. Baeza’s figures are hybrid,“fugitive,” and “unruly,” merging the human and the non-human to create fantastical images that conjure realms of myth, spirit, and imagination. Untethered to specific temporal or spatial referents, Baeza’s figures construct alternative possibilities for themselves as autonomous and multi-networked subjects.
Baeza works with the conceptualization of what he calls forms that engage in "acts of refusal" —racialized, queered, and otherly-abled persons whose existence transgresses multiple limitations of identity. The figures that emerge in his works—rendered in different states of visibility and cloaked with ancestral symbols and images—are not resolved but rather always in a process of becoming. What they share in common is an unabashed beauty sited beyond aesthetics.
Baeza received a B.F.A. from Cooper Union and an M.F.A. from Yale University. He has participated in the Federico Sevilla Sierra Residency, Mullowney Printing, Portland, OR (2023), and the Lower East Side Keyholder Residency, New York (2010). Baeza has been awarded fellowships such as the Latinx Artist Fellowship, US Latinx Art Forum (2023), NXTHVN Studio Fellowship Program, New Haven, CT (2019), and The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation Traveling Fellowship (2017). In 2022, he was a guest scholar at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Baeza had been awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2018), and the Michael S. Vivo Prize for Drawing (2009).
Baeza’s work is included in the collections of various institutions, such as: Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA), CA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Baeza lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Felipe Baeza recently received the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Visual Arts for his studio practice and poetic style that engages multiple mediums and traditions to explore spirituality, otherness, and regeneration. Born in Mexico and based in the United States, Baeza’s work is informed by his experiences as an adolescent, navigating the structures and institutions that often marginalize those they purport to protect.
The Vilcek Foundation is dedicated to raising awareness of the vital role immigration plays in enriching the arts, culture, and society in the United States.
From April 26 to June 31, kurimanzutto will host Baeza's solo exhibition To feel a then and there at the Mexico City gallery.
kurimanzutto co-represents Felipe Baeza with Maureen Paley, London.