José Manuel Ciria Art Exhibit: “New Paintings” January 23, 2009

José Manuel Ciria Art Exhibit: “New Paintings”
Exposición de José Manuel Ciria: “New Paintings”
January 22 –March 20
Instituto Cervantes gallery
Free admission
Gallery hours: Monday-Thursday 9am-7pm, Friday 9am-5pm, Saturday 9am-1pm
Opening reception: Friday, January 23 at 6:30pm
“I venture to say that José Ciria is a great painter, by which I mean that he has complete command of his medium and means: paint and the modernist vocabulary of abstraction [which is] as gestural as geometrical. It’s impossible to escape the plane [surface]—the gospel truth of modernist painting—even as the slimness of the stylistic layer is brought to life by various events that take place on its surface: spattering, dripping, splashing, a certain flourish of brushwork, an exciting mixture of the refined and coarse, the elegant and gritty, making for Ciria´s own unmistakable signature painting, as it has been called.”
- Donald Kuspit
José Manuel Ciria was born in Manchester (UK) in 1960 but grew up in Spain. Ciria is one of the most active and internationally successful contemporary Spanish painters. His abstract work is featured in the collections of Spain’s most important museums, such as the Museo de Arte Reina Sofía and the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno.

Official Website: http://chicago.cervantes.es