Yellow Peril Gallery Presents Raquel Paiewonsky at VOLTA NY 2016 During Armory Arts Week

New York, NY, February 10, 2016 --(PR.com)-- Yellow Peril Gallery is pleased to announce a solo presentation of new work from Raquel Paiewonsky at VOLTA NY 2016 during Armory Arts Week from March 2-6. In 2015, she was artist-in-residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, supported by The Davidoff Art Initiative. This vibrant series is inspired by her time in Germany’s capital and cultural center. Paiewonsky’s “Interludio,” which was awarded the 24th Concurso de Arte Eduardo León Jimenes in the Dominican Republic for her performance at the Museo de Arte Moderno of Santo Domingo, is one of the featured videos to be screened on VOLTA NY’s 30-foot video wall near the entrance.

Raquel Paiewonsky (b. 1969, Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic) works across a range of media, including painting, sculpture, installation and photography. She has presented at 15 solo exhibitions in the Dominican Republic and the United States, as well as group shows in the US, France, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Ecuador, among others. Paiewonsky has also presented work at the 53rd and 55th Venice Biennale in the Latin American Pavilion.

“The predominantly feminine social body in Raquel Paiewonsky’s work addresses issues of gender politics, couple relationships, sexuality, maternity, ecology and other issues of a general nature, but it also alludes to hot-button issues in the Dominican context, such as prostitution,” notes Gerardo Mosquera, Chief Curator of the San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial. “The artist uses the body as a kind of tropological platform from which to illuminate these issues in their own complexity and in the imaginal complexity of art, without falling into the prevailing literalness of socially critical art in her country. We are mistaken if we think that her artworks are about the body or sexuality. They are so only indirectly, because here the body is above all else a critical resource that drives the artist’s expression with great power.”

Although seldom conveying violence explicitly, Paiewonsky’s work is very much concerned with the veiled but insidious violence that permeates the personal, social and political systems in which we live. “I am particularly interested in object / subject interventions, often utilizing fabric or collage as a means of taking over a particular space, body or artifact,” she stresses. “In recent years, my work explores the relationship between our essence and our surroundings, the impact of stereotypes and cultural constructions, always taking as a reference our instinctual selves and the ways in which the primal component of our nature is affected by the new and ever changing contexts of contemporary life.”

Paiewonsky’s work is in international collections that include Daros-Latinoamérica, Zürich, Switzerland; The RISD Museum, Rhode Island; Museum of Modern Art, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Centro León, Santiago, Dominican Republic. She is the recipient the Gran Premio Eduardo León award in 2006, 2008 and 2012, and included in the XX and XXII editions of the National Visual Arts Biennial of Santo Domingo. Paiewonsky holds a BFA from Parsons School of Design and co-founded Quintipata, an internationally recognized art collective from the Dominican Republic that includes Pascal Meccariello, Jorge Pineda, and Belkis Ramirez.

This is Yellow Peril Gallery’s debut at VOLTA NY, the invitational fair of solo artist projects and the American incarnation of the original Basel VOLTA show, which was founded in 2005 by three art dealers as a fair "by galleries, for galleries." Their presentation of new work from Raquel Paiewonsky will be in Booth D11 at Pier 90 during Armory Arts Week in New York from March 2-6, 2016.