Angel Otero

Book excerpt: "Angel Otero: Everything and Nothing, the artist's first survey exhibition, encompasses more than a decade's worth of painting and sculpture. This resplendent monograph, which accompanies the exhibition yet is intended to endure long beyond it, reveals both the overt themes and the more ambiguous substructures of Otero's oeuvre to date, from his early still lifes and famous "skins"--paintings made of fragments and scraps of oil paint culled from previously painted images--to his more recent "transfers" and innovative sculptural work in porcelain and steel or iron. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Otero has enjoyed massive acclaim since he first began exhibiting his work in Chicago in the mid-2000s. Like so many artists, he continued his trajectory to New York, and today, from his studio in Brooklyn, he continues to push against a myriad of personal and art-historical narratives in ways that are palpable in his lush, seductive canvases and in the hybrid products of his kiln. This volume contains, in addition to many dazzling images and large-scale details of Otero's work, two incisive essays and a wide-ranging interview, which, from their quite different perspectives, reveal the corporeal, cultural, and intellectual repositories that have shaped Otero as an artist as well as the vast web of connective tissues that have sustained his creative endeavors over the past decade."--Publisher's website.