Y Gallery is pleased to present Fortalezas, the first New York solo exhibition by Peruvian artist Alberto Borea, curated by Cecilia Jurado. Fortalezas means fortress in Spanish, a monumental construction that is highly protected, but also means strength and fortitude. Borea, who has worked through the years making parallels between contemporary cities and ancient ruins, brings together four groups of works for this new exhibition based on the relationships of economy and culture.

For one of the series, the artist takes stock-market graphics from the latest crisis including the one from the fall of 2008 to depict the forms of a variety of well-known ruins like Keops, Kefren and Micerino, Teotihuacan, Macchu Picchu, and many more. Borea addresses the fragility of any economic model by juxtaposing our present reality with the history of these old civilizations.

The exhibition as a whole shows how Borea remains doubtful about the unlimited force of any new technologic and ideologic advance, just like in the central sculpture where the keyboard of a laptop has been re-assembled to form a decadent ruin. In a more poetic approach, a video closes the show, where a camera moves up and down, registering on the bottom the horizon of a ruin and on the top the skyline of a city full of buildings, a city soon to become history.

Alberto Borea has participated in several exhibitions in Europe, Latin America and the U.S. Recent and upcoming shows include Planet of Slums curated by Omar Lopez Chahoud and LaToya Ruby Frazier; The Golden Bench at 20 Hoxton Square; The Street Files, El Museo del Barrio Biennial 2011, Cine a Contracorriente at CCCB Barcelona; among others. Recently, Borea has been the recipient of important artists grants such as The International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), Art Omi, Skowhegan, Sculpture Space, and VSC (Pollock Krasner). He lives and works in New York.