Henri y Rei conmigo | Candida Alvarez

Medium: Screenprint
Paper Type: Arches 88
Year: 2019
Edition Size: 30
Dimensions: 20″ x 23″
Inscriptions: Edition, Title, Signature, Year

Published Spudnik Press Cooperative

Henri y Rei Conmigo takes its name from two of Candida Alvarez’ inspirations: Henri Matisse and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. In keeping with the spirit of Matisse’s painting entitled The Red Studio, 1911” which reveals a mini retrospective of his paintings, sculpture and ceramics, Alvarez chose to re-create that room and add paintings from her 2017 exhibition “Here: Candida Alvarez” at the Chicago Cultural Center, curated by Terry R Myers. She also included personal objects from her own studio and a colorful stripe of a geometric patterning that links this introspective and representational screenprint to her abstract paintings.

“I added the strip of yellow, black and white trim just like I did in the exhibition to hold everything together and to give the paintings a perspective from which to begin new conversations about the spaces they all uniquely occupied in time. It acknowledges my collaboration with Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. which used that pattern for textile designs on her 2017 Men’s Couture Collection and her Shirt 2017 collection.” – Candida Alvarez

Candida Alvarez is a Puerto Rican artist and educator from Brooklyn, NY. Public collections of her work include The Whitney Museum of American Art and she has been reviewed by Art in America, ARTnews, and The New York Times. She has collaborated with the fashion label Comme des Garçons and received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art and is the distinguished F.H. Sellers Chair in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught for 20 years.