Juan Pablo uribe

Juan Pablo Uribe is a Colombian artist and architect living and working in New York. After touring various Latin American cities, he focused on the impact and evolution of modernity in developing countries. His work is built upon his training as an architect, which renders a constant exploration of modern and post-war art history and its appropriation.

 

Within his multifaceted use of paper, the young artist brings together blocks of recycled and classified paper, documents which served different purposes. By stacking them, Uribe brigns forth hues of green, blue, white or yellow. Some are finalised as small blocks, others are arranged in columns. All present various coloured thin lines that form complex geometric patterns. At times these lines and patterns are reminiscent of Frank Stella's minimalist paintings or Agnès Martin’s grids against muted backgrounds, and are part of a series of works that move between the pictorial and the sculptural, with which Uribe reflects on the history of painting and the concept of painting itself. 

 

Iterations within his practice echo the work of Colombian abstract artist Carlos Rojas, as well as pay tribute to the aesthetics and reflections of other artists including, Carl André, Sol Lewitt and Kazimir Malevich, through other sculptures of concrete, plaster and tiles. Concerned with the conditions of his social environment, Uribe uses everyday objects and found materials for architectural constructions, where the pictorial notion gives way to a theoretical, almost modernist, rhetoric.