hpgrp gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in New York by artist Jorge Julian Aristizabal.

Throughout a career that spans more than two decades, Aristizabal has created paintings and drawings based on fragile structures that challenge and defy the sense of balance and order through concepts that not only demonstrate how vulnerable we are but remind us of our emotional conditions, frustrations and disappointments as well our sense of hope, enlightenment, joy, humor and sexuality.

Included in this exhibition, are 10 ink and acrylic drawings that depict the beginning of his creative process, where different images are superimposed creating a personal narrative which radiate an intense optical overload. A second group of 17 small acrylic paintings reflect a careful selection of the characters which will have a major role in his bigger paintings, it’s as if Aristizabal is telling the viewers, look carefully these are the major characters in the story I am going to tell you. The last group of five larger acrylic paintings, the artist carefully conveys all the images and information he has gathered previously to give us a group of paintings, which depict an imaginary world invented by the artist in order to negotiate with a thematic structure that deals with gender, power, sex and humor. The work is charged with unusual narratives and unique colors in which the familiar becomes strange and the strange becomes familiar.

Jorge Julian Aristizabal was born in Medellin, Colombia, in 1962, and currently lives in New York. Aristizabal received his BFA from Otis/Parsons school of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA (1985) and a MFA from Goldsmiths College, London, UK (2000). His work has been included in a numerous exhibitions “VII Bienal de Bogota,” Museum of Modern Art, Bogota, Colombia. (1999), “For the Love of Dog,” Pump House Gallery, London, UK (2000). “Assembly” Stepney City, London, UK (2001). He has had many solo exhibitions in Colombia such as: “The Canary and the Board, Prints in the Memory of Jorge Julian Aristizabal,” Museum de Antioquia (2003). In 2007 he inaugurated “Until Now Drawings 97/07” at the Center for Contemporary Art, University of EAFIT, Medellin, Colombia, accompanied with a major publication of his drawings done in the last ten years.