Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Angel Otero’s Milagros. The New York-based artist will debut a series of recent, large-scale tapestry-like oil paintings that hang entirely free from a stretcher bar. Over the last decade, Otero has developed physically rigorous and experimental techniques to push the boundaries of painting. Drawing much of his inspiration from the inherent qualities of oil paint, Otero uses collage and materiality as he explores the potential for abstraction to engage issues of identity as well as form, color, and line. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, March 7, from 6 to 8 PM at 501 West 24th Street.

Otero’s practice is rooted in the history of painting and abstraction. Through a methodically innovative process, the artist paints representationally onto large sheets of glass, scrapes the partially dried oil paint from the surface, and then reassembles and often collages the “skins” into multi-layered compositions. For his most recent body of work, Otero builds upon the paintings featured in his 2017 exhibition Angel Otero: Elegies at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, where he premiered a series of large-scale paintings composed of fragments of previous discarded paintings and cut scraps that he had accumulated in his studio over the years. These fragments—smaller, and more varied in size, shape, and palette—introduce new conceptual and aesthetic elements in his work. Whereas previous paintings were collaged from an individual skin that Otero both carved into and painted onto, these new paintings incorporate years of saved and salvaged materials, dexterously arranged together on a scale akin to that of individual brush strokes. Otero’s impulse to reuse materials is linked to his long-held interest in their potential to convey history, memory, and the temporal nature of his practice.