Congrats to Jose Parla from Miami.

These works bring the city into the gallery, offering a direct encounter without the mediations of transit that normally conditions our engagement with city walls.

His paintings suggest a synthetic rereading of Abstract Expressionist painting, reinterpreted through Minimalism, to recover the performative aspects of Abstract Expressionism.

In the case of Parlá’s work, each marking or writing is simply one moment in a series of discrete, individual performances — his calligraphic language occupies a different category than painterly markings, because it is not simply gesture but a symbolic carrier of meaning.

Inspired by his travels around the world, Parlá’s paintings reveal the city to be both figuratively biographical — in the internal sense of remembered events, personal and public — and literally biographical — in the sense of having one’s biography actually written on the walls of the city. For STAGES, he has chosen to honor cancer patients by immortalizing the names of more than 250 cancer survivors in the dense scripted layers of his piece, bringing their myriad stories together into one great visual manifesto of hope in honor of the LIVESTRONG mission.

José Parlá was born in Miami and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.