Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce an exhibition by painter Pedro Barbeito. This will be Barbeito's first exhibition at Lehmann Maupin.
Pedro Barbeito was born in La Caruña, Spain in 1969 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Since graduating with an MFA in painting from Yale University, Barbeito has exhibited at the Rose Art Museum, Exit Art, Mario Diacano gallery and Basilico Fine Arts. This year, he was the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. His first solo show at Lehmann Maupin will focus on a series of six large oval paintings and six three-dimensional prints all executed in the last year.
Recently, Barbeito's pieces have become a complex hybrid of the information and presentation used by a number of cutting-edge technologies. Due to enhanced processing speeds, the computer is now able to translate large amounts of scientific data into images and 3-D simulations. What was once invisible is now rendered visible. Barbeito uses these seemingly abstract representations of the cosmos and quantum world as a source for his paintings.
After downloading images of stellar births, black holes, and other astronomical phenomena, Barbeito manipulates the representations in two and three dimensional computer programs. The results are painstakingly transferred by hand to oval canvases. In each composition, thickly layered textures and colors correspond to textures, colors, and bump maps present in highly developed computer game graphics. In addition, Barbeito complicates the image by integrating Iris prints, pigment prints and 3-D polyester models into the opaque and translucent paint. Through a combination of graphic grid patterns and pixilated relief forms, Barbeito produces sophisticated and dizzying works that exist, like the cosmos, between the scientific and the fantastic and push painting to a new level.
Concurrently, Barbeito produced six 3-D prints based on satellite x-ray images of the universe (i.e. nebula, galaxies, or black holes). The center of each print is a downloaded image of the satellite, while the remaining three tiers use both pixilated and linear images that the satellite has taken. In all his work, space, science, and technology can be seen on a number of levels simultaneously, allowing Barbeito to stretch and challenge the limits of artistic representation.