PADRE: DREAM MAKERS

© Edgar Plans

Between July 23rd and September 5th, Padre Gallery in New York is proud to present a group exhibition Dream Makers, featuring works by Zurab Tsereteli. Adriana Oliver, Edgar Plans, Ana Barriga, Baldur Helgason, and Jeff McCreight aka Ru8icon.

In times when not only dreams get brutally shattered by the harsh reality around us, but the most common, everyday norms are completely out of the picture, the world seems to be needing dreamers more than ever before. With this in mind, Pablo G. Villazán from Padre Gallery curated Dream Makers, a group exhibition featuring 6 international artists coming from different backgrounds, age groups, and working with different aesthetics, to lift our spirits and bring back hope. The selection made for this presentation includes creatives whose work is marked with originality and the ability to see the world around us way beyond what the eye and mind can recognize. Whether creating their own, unique universes, reinventing the existing imagery, or using the reality as an endless source of inspiration from which new perspectives are built, the Dream Makers certainly have the ability to lift us above the everyday gloom and point towards brighter and pleasing sights.

Zurab Tsereteli​ is an important Soviet/Russian painter, sculptor and architect known for commemorative, large-scale monuments created worldwide. Along with sculpture and architecture, he works with paintings, informed by his visit to Paris in the 1960s, when he was strongly influenced by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists.

Adriana Oliver​ is Barcelona-based artist whose works are informed by the photography and Pop Art she’s been exposed to since early age. Once she started developing her painterly practice, her visual language developed towards bold figurative forms influenced by cinematographic pictures from the 50’s and 60’s, which offer a more nuanced narrative than photography through their spotlighted obscurity.

Edgar Plans​ is a Spanish artist that lives in Gijón and works with raw, intuitive, and exceptionally playful imagery through which he channels the innocence and optimism of children. Utilizing their limitless ideas and ideals through doodle-like visuals, he takes on grown up problems through pure, naive, yet refreshing whimsical perspective.

Ana Barriga​ is a Madrid-based artist that uses the existing objects, mostly ceramic flea market discoveries, to assemble and construct new narratives. Through an expressive and confident painterly technique, she is applying new characteristics to otherwise tacky souvenirs, challenging the limitations of her own as well as viewers’ imagination.

Baldur Helgason​ is Iceland-born and Chicago-based artist whose surreal pictures reflect his own experiences and visions of the world around him. Using a signature, vintage cartoon-like character to channel his emotions, he is wrapping the most intimate stories with humor, absurdity, and wit, often subtly referencing classical art or popular culture phenomenons.

Jeff McCreight aka Ru8icon​ is an American artist based out of Barcelona whose work experiments with the real life moments by altering existing photographs and accenting or adding a new narrative to them. Through a meticulous realistic visual language, he is able to conceal certain attributes, accent the atmosphere, add movement or dynamics, and simply enhance reality.

© Baldur Helgason

About the curator:

Pablo G. Villazán is the co-founder and director of Padre Gallery with locations in New York City and Moscow, as well as PADRE projects.

Coming from a very well-respected family that have contributed to the development of the art world between Spain and France during the 20th century. Since they founded their first art gallery in Paris in 1890. Pablo G. Villazán always expressed a great passion and interest in the family’s love for art. This led him to become the artist of the family. Despite receiving numerous national painting awards, he decided to study Law and Economics.

Pablo finished his law degree in Madrid in 1999, he began working as a lawyer, leaving behind his artistic side.

He met the artist Manolo Bonifacio at the opening of one of his exhibitions in Madrid. After a conversation with the artist, he compulsively began to study his work and the work of other artists from the same generation such as Juan Barjola, Manuel Hernández Mompó or the El Paso group. This moment marked a turning point in his professional career, and he began to combine his work as a lawyer with teaching as an art professor at the university.

Ultimately, the complete turnaround in his career came in September 2012 when on a trip to New York. He dabled into the work of Keith Haring, Andy Warhol and Basquiat. His obsession with the cultural movement of New York in the 80s influenced him to make a drastic decision. He left his job in Madrid and moved to New York to earn a master’s degree from The School of Visual Art. This is the same school in which Keith Haring studied.

Once in New York, he began to collaborate in exhibitions with public organizations and museums such as the Brooklyn museum and The Moma PS1.

In September 2015, he opened his first art gallery in downtown Manhattan with a show featuring a graphic documentation by Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Basquiat, Grace Jones and Robert Mapplethorpe called "The Incredible Keith".

Since then Pablo has become one of the most respected art dealers in the international scene. He has built and continues to build private collections around the world.