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Pepe Mar | RISING SUN
Established in 2016, the Atrium Project is an annual series of commissioned projects that presents the work of emerging and mid-career Hispanic and Latinx artists. Often providing an opportunity for artists to push their work into ambitious areas of exploration in subject and/or scale, each project is on view for one year on a prominent large-scale wall in the museum’s central atrium. These site-responsive projects are developed over the course of a year leading up to the installation and involve artists visits to Kansas City, inspiration from which often becomes intuitively incorporated into the projects. The Atrium Project has included installations by José Lerma (2016), Firelei Báez (2017), Paul Henry Ramirez (2018), Angel Otero (2019), Joiri Minaya (2020), Aliza Nisenbaum (2021), and Pepe Mar (2022). A project with Sarah Zapata is forthcoming in 2023.
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s seventh annual Atrium Project, Pepe Mar: Rising Sun, features a monumental fabric painting by Miami-based artist Pepe Mar (born Reynosa, Mexico, 1977). This installation highlights the signature fabric featured throughout Mar’s recent practice—a medium-weight textile printed with images sourced from his 15-year career archive—stretched across the expanse of the main atrium wall.
During site visits to Kemper Museum, Mar researched the Permanent Collection and encountered Rising Sun (1958), a work by modernist painter Hans Hofmann (German American, 1880–1966). An example of abstract expressionism, the painting is composed of swaths of bright colors—oranges, blues, yellows, and greens—applied gesturally upon the surface of the canvas, creating irregular shapes with defined and unblended boundaries. Hofmann’s juxtaposition of discrete colors in many ways mirrors collage practice, where elements are brought together but remain distinct. It can perhaps be said that Hofmann collaged paint, resonating with Mar’s collaging of his own archive across his fabric works. Taking inspiration from Hofmann’s technique and palette, Mar stained the fabric to approximate the colors of Rising Sun. In so doing, Mar creates a place for himself in the lineages of art history and addresses his own stylistic and material inheritances.
As part of the Atrium Project installation, Mar has also created a new large-scale assemblage work depicting the newest iteration of the artist’s “Paprikas”: characters, or alter egos, that recur throughout Mar’s works. Their bodies, made from the influences that surround Mar in his studio and objects culled from antique and thrift shops, reflect the artist’s Queer, Latinx experience. Pepe Mar’s work is a layering of histories and materials capturing his overall ideas in a single monumental installation.
Pepe Mar: Rising Sun is organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs.