Wilfredo Prieto | in The Bakery: Fake News
PRESS RELEASE
FAKE NEWS
Wilfredo Prieto
March 12 – May 1, 2021
In The Bakery, Annet Gelink Gallery is pleased to present Fake News, Wilfredo Prieto's (Sancti-Spiritus, Cuba, 1978) fourth solo show at the gallery.
Fake News presents a range of paintings created during Prieto’s exhibition at Galería Habana that ran from March 21 to April 30, 2020. As a daily exercise, Prieto read the news from the national and international press, and interpreted this information (or misinformation) through painting, proposing a periodic reflection on fake news and post-truths. Through this act, Prieto transmuted the news we see and read daily on digital devices to that most traditional of media, painting.
Initially conceptualized as an exhibition that would open daily with the day’s headlines transcribed into twelve fresh work, the first global lockdown in response to COVID-19 made the repeated openings logistically impossible. As such, the exhibition and the daily works were presented online and through social media.
More than a comment on the state of our online reading habits, Prieto also inverts the traditional reverence associated with painting, by creating almost instant artworks that are named after the clickbait headlines upon which the paintings are based.
In the way the news stories manipulate and create new realities, Prieto transposes the online world onto canvas in ways that further shape and reshape our day-to-day. The works reverberate between the online mutability of truth and reality and the physical constant and traditional appreciation of the created paintings. Through the sheer number of works produced, however, Prieto pulls apart this manufactured stability – much as the proliferation of stories repeated through different online media pulls at the seams of what is real.
That the works were initially presented online last year, to be presented in the physical space of the gallery a year after the first lockdown, adds further coincidental layers to the works. As the works bounce from our screens to the walls and back again, Fake News confronts us with life imitating art.
Wilfredo Prieto studied at the Escuela Profesional de Artes Plásticas in Trinidad, Cuba, from 1992 to 1996; afterwards he attended the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana from 1998 to 2002. He currently lives and works in Havana, Cuba. His latest solo exhibitions were held at Fondazione Mora Greco, Naples (2019), Museo de Arte Contemporaneo del Zulia, Maracaibo (2015), Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2015), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, Havana (2015), S.M.A.K., Gent (2014), NMAC Foundation, Cadiz (2013), Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros, Mexico (2012), 11th Havana Bienal, J and Calzada, Havana (2012), Praxis, ARTIUM, Vitoria (2011), Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2011), Dia Art Foundation, New York (2007).
Wilfredo Prieto's work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the 12th Havana Biennal (2015), Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Linz (2014), Centre d`Art la Panera, Lleida (2014), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2014), Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2013), Collateral Event of the 55th Venice Bienal, Venice (2013), Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo (CA2M), Móstoles, Madrid (2011), 29th Sao Paolo Biennial, Sao Paolo (2010), De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam (2010), 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (curated by Stefano Rabolli), Venice (2010), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009) and MoMA, New York (2008). Wilfredo Prieto received The Cartier Award (Frieze, London, 2008) and the 2000 UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts (7th Havana Biennial, DUPP, Havana, 2000).
