NEW YORK, NY.- The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art is presenting Paul Gardère: Vantage Points, an exhibition celebrating the life and work of the late Haitian, New York City-based artist Paul Gardère A’67. Installed over two floors of the historic landmark of the Stuyvesant-Fish House, this retrospective includes more than two dozen works from the artist’s 40+ year career. The 2024-25 Fish House exhibition is presented courtesy of the Estate of Paul Gardère with coordination by School of Art Dean Adriana Farmiga and Assistant Dean Yuri Masnyj.

Vantage Points delivers a loosely chronological, condensed version of Gardère’s trajectory through a range of styles from the early 1970s to the late 2000s. Throughout this expansive body of paintings, mixed media works, and works on paper, there is a continuous thematic focus on the artist’s Haitian experience and Haitian culture, both in Haiti and in the diaspora. Gardère’s work frequently focuses on the legacies of colonialism—often signified by recognizable works and artists from art history—but reconstructed through his own novel approaches with diverse materiality, form, and technique.

The show opens with two of Gardère’s monochromatic, blue gouache works on paper from the early ‘70s contrasted against a large, mixed media work from the late ‘90s, Triplex Horizon, that inspired the show’s title. This piece, boldly imbued with the red-and-blue colors of the Haitian flag, juxtaposes a torn and collaged reproduction of Haitian artist Rigaud Benoit’s Shipwreck, 1965 against both Claude Monet’s idyllic rendering of continental leisure in Garden at Sainte-Adresse, 1867 and two glitter-framed photographs of the American coastline. On the opposite wall, The King, 1981 depicts a mounted figure rendered as if in stone and surrounded by mangoes, corn, and the frame of a barren tree. The figure is set in front of a painterly, cartographic backdrop that recedes back to the ocean. This work dates to the six-year period when the artist returned to live in Haiti as an adult with his family. Upon moving back to New York City in 1984, the artist shifted from this traditional, pictorial Haitian aesthetic to more contemporary style, beginning to employ mixed media while maintaining conceptual focus on Haitian spiritual motifs. This move is seen in two nearby diptych plaster works from the Symbolic Relief series that feature the same striking red-and-blue color palette.

The show progresses through the early ‘80s with figurative ink on paper works from the artist’s vast Heads series initiated during his time at The Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as several pieces from Gardère’s Giverny Revisited series. Inspired by the artist’s conflicted experience at Monet’s gardens in the ‘90s, these works reframe the celebrated gardens as a beautifully contrived metaphor for man’s imperialist drive. Upstairs, an ornately decorated room features works from the Multiple Narratives series in which etchings by French Neoclassicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres are worked over and then encased within wood enclosures painted and gouged by the artist.

Vantage Points presents Gardère as an artist simultaneously accessing the world through the differing lenses of his cultural triangulation: as a Haitian in the diaspora; as an American citizen who spent most of his life learning, raising family and even owning land in the U.S.; and as an arguable, if unwilling, porter of French mores as a member of the Catholic, Francophone Haitian class. In his reflections on colonialism and global history, on art making and visual culture, and on his own lived experience, Gardère channeled conflicts in his work, both inner and historical, that remain powerfully affective.

Paul Claude Gardère was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1944. In 1959, at age 14, Gardère and his younger brother were brought to Queens, New York to escape the regime of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, disrupting a comfortable childhood and life among extended family. The alienation, language barrier, and change in societal position and racial dynamics created a profound culture shock. Displaced, lonely, and longing for home, Gardère found frequent comfort in the halls of The Metropolitan Museum of Art appreciating art’s power to communicate non-verbally as a kind of “metaphysical bridge," he later said. He first studied at The Art Students League and applied to The Cooper Union to pursue this creative path. He began his first semester in September 1963.

In 1967, Gardère graduated from Cooper Union. He continued at Hunter College, earning a Master of Fine Arts in 1972. He was the first Haitian Artist-in-Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem (’89-'90), was a recipient of a distinguished 5-month residency at Claude Monet’s gardens in Giverny, France in 1993, and won the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painting in 1998, among other awards. He lectured at universities around the U.S., and his works reside in the permanent collections of numerous notable institutions. In 2011, his sudden death in New York City at age 66 was a shock to his community. His legacy is carried forward by his daughter Cat Gardère who directs his estate, engaging his work within the contemporary art, social, and political conversations to which Paul Gardère’s work remains deeply relevant.

Work from Gardère’s Symbolic Relief series from the mid-80’s is also on view at Canada Gallery through mid-November 2024.