Artist Biography:
Antonio Pulgarin (b. 1989) is a Colombian-American Lens-Based Artist who utilizes photography, photographic collage, and mixed media in his practice. Pulgarin mounted his first solo exhibition at Kingsborough Art Museum in the fall of 2019. Pulgarin’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Aperture Foundation, Longwood Art Gallery and BRIC. His work has received honors from YoungArts, The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, EnFoco, The Magenta Foundation, Latin American Fotografia, American Photography, and PDN Photo Annual. Pulgarin will be exhibiting his work at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland and at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz in 2020.
Pulgarin’s work has been featured in publications such as Vice, UnSeen Magazine, Visual Arts Journal, BESE, Slate, LensCulture and The Huffington Post. He received his BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Pulgarin was named a 2019 Fellow of the AIM Fellowship program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Statement:
In my practice I use photography, photographic collage and photo based installations to create conceptually focused works that tackle the themes of cultural and queer identity, memory, and displacement. These works utilize the family archive, patterned fabrics and additional printed source materials. The final two-dimensional compositions often incorporate cut out patterns to obscure sections of the original archival image, often blocking out an entire figure. What we see is an incomplete family portrait, intentionally erased persons, deconstructed moments and new memories. In my work, elements of nostalgia, personal narrative – relating to my heritage, and notions of masculinity are all present. The collaged elements remind the viewer that these images have been intervened, brought to the present and reimagined.
Artist Website: http://www.antoniopulgarin.com/