Trust Memory Over History – Repeating Islands

Firelei Báez’s solo exhibition “Firelei Báez: Trust Memory Over History” is now on view at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Wolfsburg, Germany) until October 13, 2024. The exhibition was previously on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Denmark. [Also see previous post Trust Memory over History.]

Description: With dynamic compositions, intense color variety, and enigmatic motifs, the large-format paintings and expansive installations of the Dominican American artist Firelei Báez (b. 1981) demand attention and invite the viewer into visually overwhelming experiences in today’s overstimulated culture.

The New York-based artist’s fictional pictorial worlds combine headless creatures that magically oscillate between human, plant, and animal, with seductively shiny hair, colorful feathers, plump fruit, and storm-tested palm trees. With a painterly stroke of liberation, Firelei Báez contrasts the violent chapters of world history with beauty and joy. Her themes range from Dominican and Caribbean culture, science fiction, and art and natural history to the colonial era, migration, life in the diaspora, racism, and gender issues.

While Firelei Báez’s paintings are based on historical maps, construction plans, or diagrams, her paper installations consist primarily of painted book pages. The maps document state borders and thus control mechanisms and power relations, her abstract compositions and powerful creatures occupy and explode this world order. Her figures are difficult to grasp—self-determined, they defy categorization. They subvert Eurocentric views and demonstrate resistance to past and present social hierarchies.

“The energy that I have experienced in the world has to be expressed or I’ll just burst.”—Firelei Báez

In this sense, the exhibition title, Trust Memory Over History, refers to the vast space between memory and oral tradition on the one hand and written and mapped history on the other. Firelei Báez confronts the absence of critical voices of discriminated people and countries in historical documents of the manifestation of power with colorful and figurative presence as a form of intervention. With this corrective retrospection, she creates perspectives for alternative, global, and future-oriented ways of thinking. 

Following the acquisition of an installation by Firelei Báez in 2018, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is now presenting the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Germany. It features mainly paintings and paper installations from recent years, including a work conceived especially for the exhibition in Wolfsburg.

The exhibition was created in cooperation with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, and will be accompanied by a publication in English.

For more information and examples of artwork, see https://www.kunstmuseum.de/en/exhibition/firelei-baez-trust-memory-over-history/

[Shown above by Mats Nordman: Firelei Báez, Encyclopedia of gestures (Jeu du monde), 2023, Öl und Acryl auf Archivdruck auf Leinwand, 209,3 × 263,8 cm, Privatsammlung, © Firelei Báez, Courtesy of Künstlerin and James Cohan, New York.]