NEW YORK, NY.- Avant Gallery is presenting Conversations with a Stranger, the first solo exhibition of artist Felipe Echeverry, AKA Lasso. The show features a collection of new paintings, sculptures and works on paper at the gallery’s Hudson Yards location. The exhibition is on view through December 22, 2019.
Through textural ruminations on community and connection, Lasso draws from the solace of observation. Seats on a crowded subway car have the solemnity of church pews at Sunday mass. A bar full of people, each ensnared by their own devices, considers the performance of the everyday, singular routines shared by hundreds. Lasso finds harmony in a cacophonous scene. His oft-intuitive mark-making reflects on the vitality of circumstance, measured from the eyes of a steady hand and the viscerality of a calm observer. The diasporic experience is felt; the contents of a suitcase, stationary but for the tactile brushstrokes, evoke the migration of thousands of miles.
Warm mahogany hues and rich cerulean blues permeate the abstract. Lasso’s figures are his idolos, regular people blessed with their own significant grace and power. In this way, he reimagines spiritual iconography with the tenets of art history and popular culture, deifying the everyday individual. In Palenquera, a web of linework and shapes depict apples, bananas and mangos with earthy charcoal and pastel, forming the traditional fruit merchants of the artist’s native Colombia. Lasso’s practice airs a dense grit of a life truly lived. Notes of Picasso, Murillo, Basquiat or Baselitz come to mind, but Lasso’s untreated canvases each retain their own raw, wondrous luster, a circuitous tête-à-tête between subject, artist and viewer.
Felipe Echeverry, AKA Lasso (b. 1988, Cali, Colombia) lives and works in New York City. Originally trained as an architect, he received his Bachelors in Architecture at San Buenaventura University (Santiago de Cali, CO) in 2011 and his MLA at Universidad de Buenos Aires in 2014. Group exhibitions include those held at Mayson gallery, Bowery Bond, New York Society for Ethical Culture, Richard Taittinger gallery. In 2018, Lasso collaborated with Saks Fifth Avenue and Good Luck Dry Cleaners for a special presentation alongside New York Fashion Week, including a window display with designers Valentino and Issey Miyake. In 2017, he was included in ArtNet’s “10 Rising Street Artists Who Are Taking the Art Form Beyond Banksy.” His work appears in numerous private collections.
