NEW YORK, NY.- Hunter College Art Galleries announces the opening of Daniel Barroca: Refusal of the Image, a solo exhibition centered on the work of Portuguese artist Daniel Barroca, curated by Hunter College MA candidate Tatiana Mouarbes. In Barroca’s multimedia and interdisciplinary practice, the artist investigates the perceptual and performative qualities of images and their reconstitution over temporal, spatial, and cultural boundaries. Marking the first solo show of Barroca’s work in the United States, the exhibition examines the artist’s experiments with the instability of images in a series of video, photography, and drawing works from the past fifteen years, including The Sequences of Memory, Silence, and War; …a hazy and confused landscape; Maps of Complicities; Stuck in a Loop: Thoughts and notes on the end of the world; The Destruction of the Destruction; and War Drawing.

Much of Barroca’s work with video, photography, drawing, and installation derives from an engagement with the mutable properties of images, their multiple lives and their perceptual transformations over time. Barroca collects and archives images, both found and personal, assembling a repository of historical images to work from and within, in order to locate varying synchronicities inscribed in these diverse selections. Barroca draws from a wide-range of historical and documentary material – photographs, videos, and sound recordings – produced at the time of major epochal events. Dislodging these from their contextual origin through abstraction and collage in his video and drawing works, the artist configures a new, unspecified space for his images. By blurring distinctions between an image’s form and content, a process of structural reworking through multiple mediums, Barroca exposes the shadows of images – those traces of memory, form, and gesture belonging to a timeless realm of collective experience.

DANIEL BARROCA
Daniel Barroca was born in Lisbon in 1976. He studied painting and visual arts at Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (ArCo), Lisbon and earned a degree in visual arts from Escola Superior de Arte e Design (ESAD), Caldas da Rainha in 2001. He was a resident artist at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 2008 and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in 2010 and 2011. Since his first solo show in 2001, the artist’s work has been extensively exhibited by international institutions such as Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach, Germany; Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto; National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow; Rijksakademie, Amsterdam; Spanish Academy, Rome; Qbox Gallery, Athens; and Queens Museum, New York. Barroca is currently a resident artist in The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program (2014-2015) and is the recipient of a research grant from the Marcelino Botin Foundation for his project A land that is more slippery than stable.