A traveling exhibition previously exhibited at the Instituto Cervantes in Paris, Fragile Creatures arrives to New York. While planning for this exhibition the artist used Jose Maria Sicilia’s studio in Malakoff, where he made, un-made and re-made the world, creating objects from everything that surrounded him. He manufactured all sorts of objects, elaborated all sort of structures, arranged all kinds of playlets.

“Beyond the playful fable-like aspects of Iturria’s iconography, which relishes in extended metaphors, the artist unfolds questions regarding the origin of life, and these first instants where life takes form into the dual figures of man and insect. The works abound in forms that are reminiscent of a rudimental mode of figuration which speaks volumes about the meaning of the artist’s quest. Ignacio Iturria’s artwork concerns itself with painting’s ability to express a vision, to give it substance- that is to say to incarnate it- and thus to manage to create something like an “other world”, as opposed to a parallel one, of which so many people persist of producing images. Drawn straight out of the tube in the pictorical substance itself, Iturria’s small characters are molded and reduced to the simplest expression, they stand for humanity itself, its diversity, varied emotions, and even its bodily moves. Iturria draws strange insects: painted or made of iron thread, cardboard, fabric and so on, which he collected and then meshed in paint. By the equal importance he ascribes to insect and human, his world offers itself up as microcosm peopled with “ fragile creatures”. Each work becomes part of a narrative imbedded in a larger whole, his representations of individuals as paired human silhouettes in a perfect formal analogy with that of the insect illustrates his universal vision.” 1

Native of Uruguay, Ignacio Iturria has exhibited extensively throughout Europe, America and Asia in the past decades. After being awarded the “Casa di Risparmio” Special Prize at the LVI Venice Biennale in 1995, his thick-textured, dreamy and mysterious images in which brown and ochre palettes predominate have been featured in solo museum shows at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, Fine Arts Museum in Buenos Aires, Boca Raton Museum in Florida and The Power Plant in Toronto among others.

Praxis International Art was founded in 1977 to bring Latin American modern and contemporary art forward to a worldwide audience in museum-quality exhibitions throughout its network of galleries. Today it is proud of the role that it plays in bringing together artists, collectors, critics and art enthusiasts around the world for a deeper understanding of Latin American modern and contemporary art in all its richness and diversity.