Alta Por Fuga, Santiago Cucullu

The Alice Wilds is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of Santiago Cucullu entitled Alta por Fuga, or Exit by Escape, which opens on Friday, March 8th, 2019 with an artist reception from 5-8pm.

Argentinean born, artist Cucullu creates multi-media works that incorporate wall-sized murals, ceramics and vibrant works on paper; placing seemingly disparate pieces together and rearranging and altering their relationships with each other to find something that coalesces and comes together in the moment

Cucullu begins his process by observing and selecting imagery from the scenes that are playing out in front of him; a room full of furniture or a lost dog poster next to a food truck on the street. By isolating these moments as references within a personal history alongside references to both real and imagined contemporary characters he creates a vocabulary of drawings that errs on the side of the humor and a fondness for “Tex” Avery cartoons of the 1950s. What begins as simple, figural line work is abstracted with the addition of superfluous limbs and morphing body shapes to result in something familiar, but not exact. The image forces several questions among them “what is a body?” and how does it operate outside itself. Alta por Fuga becomes a medley of inserted lines, patterns, colors and shapes much like how a chorus comes together with a riff in your favorite song; transforming and remixing the imagery several times over.

Santiago Cucullu currently lives in Milwaukee, WI. He holds a BFA in Painting with a minor in Art History from the University of Hartford (1992) and an MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (1999). His work has been shown both nationally and internationally in public and private spaces, such as the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis (2000); Blum and Poe Gallery, Los Angeles (2001); Fondazione Sandretto Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2003); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and Gavin Brown Enterprise at Passerby, New York (2004); Musee de Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2005). In 2008 he showed at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York and the Loock Galerie in Berlin. In 2004, he participated in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum, New York; in 2006 at the Singapore Biennial; in 2010 at the Biennial of the Americas, Denver and in 2013 at the Wisconsin Triennial, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, WI. Cucullu has received several grants and residencies and has had visiting artist lectures at the Lyndon Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.