The Bronx Comes to LA

PastExhibition

Jan 5

John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres
The Bronx Comes to LA

JANUARY 16 - MARCH 27, 2021

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is very proud to present The Bronx Comes to LA, a two-person show celebrating the artistic partnership of seminal New York artists John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, a partnership spanning over 40 years. The artists first met at the Fashion Moda alternative space in the Bronx in 1979, where Ahearn was doing live castings of people in front of the storefront window, and hanging the painted portraits as an exhibit. Torres, then 18, had a keen understanding of what Ahearn was doing, having grown up working in his uncle’s religious statuary factory. The two artists worked together, visiting the statuary factory and installing the group of casts as The South Bronx Hall of Fame at the neighborhood Con Edison Building. After the Times Square Show in the summer of 1980 they opened a casting workshop together in Torres’s neighborhood on Walton Avenue. In the early Eighties they installed several permanent fiberglass relief murals in the Bronx. Ahearn and Torres have completed numerous sculpture projects together, in Baltimore, Rotterdam, Taiwan, Brazil, and Puerto Rico.

The life casting process that Ahearn and Torres’s subjects submitted to in the Bronx in 1979 is effectively the same process the artists use today: Subjects’ faces and shoulders are covered with a molding material called alginate, similar to what dentists use to make molds. Then a layer of plaster bandages are applied, forming a rigid shell mold around the alginate. The subjects breathe through straws while the materials harden, a period of around twenty minutes. The artists then take the resulting molds and fill them in with plaster to make positive casts, which are then built up and carved, and finally painted into the lifelike wall reliefs for which the pair are known.

The Bronx Comes to LA will present sixteen pieces in total dating from Bronx-era work as early as 1990 to new works completed in 2020. The gallery worked with Ahearn and Torres to select a body of work representative of the artists’ distinct practices, while also exhibiting pieces co-authored by the artists, as well as a series of self-portraits and other pieces reflective of the artists’ own lives.

The show will run from January 16th, 2021 thru March 27th, 2021 and will be available for viewing by appointment only. Appointments can be made on the gallery website or by calling the gallery at 213.687.0844.

John Ahearn (b. 1951, Binghamton, NY) studied at Cornell University and was a founding member of Collaborative Projects, Inc. and co-organizer of the Times Square Show (1980). Ahearn’s work alongside that of his long-time collaborator, Rigoberto Torres was the subject of a survey exhibition, South Bronx Hall of Fame, organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Houston in 1991, which traveled to museums in Europe and North America. In the 1980s and 1990s the artists executed several outdoor murals in the Bronx, New York and collaborated on public projects and exhibitions in Europe and North America. Between 2000 and 2002 Ahearn completed a public project in Pan Chiao, Taiwan and between 2005 and 2006, Ahearn and Torres collaborated on two large scale wall murals at the Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea in Brazil. In the fall of 2010, their work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Aljira Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ. In May 2012, John Ahearn alongside Rigoberto Torres participated in the special projects section of the Frieze Art Fair on Randall’s Island, where they presented a reconstruction of their legendary 1979 exhibition at Fashion Moda, South Bronx Hall of Fame. Ahearn’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (1980); the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1982); the Whitney Museum of American Art (1985); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1993); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1996); the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2008-2009); the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2009-2010); and “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1, New York (2015). Ahearn lives and works in NY and is represented by Alexander and Bonin, New York.

Rigoberto Torres (b. 1960, Aguadilla, Puerto Rico) moved to New York when he was four years old—first to upper Manhattan and then to the Bronx. Torres grew up working in his uncle Raul’s shop, Paul’s Statuary, Co. which would invest him with a knowledge of molding and casting that would facilitate the connection to and partnership with Ahearn. Torres creates plaster and fiberglass life-casts that are empathetic studies of real people – family, friends and strangers. The focus of Torres’s career has been the use of art to define and bring together communities by celebrating the people who live there. Torres has been selected for the Whitney Biennial Exhibition and the Venice Biennale. His work is in the collections of numerous major institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Dallas Museum of Art. Torres lives and works in Orlando, FL.