Press Release

 Terzo Piano is pleased to present “2 Horizon(te)s,” an exhibition of new work by artists María

de Los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez and Hartmut Austen, curated by Olga Viso. The

show features large scale, multimedia and fabric-based works by Rodríguez Jiménez and

paintings by Austen. The exhibition opens September 17th and closes October 31st,

2021.

María de los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez (b. 1992, Holguin, Cuba) is a visual artist based in

Brooklyn, NY. She is a 2020 MFA Painting and Printmaking graduate from Yale University

School of Art and received her BFA from The Cooper Union. She is represented by David

Castillo Gallery in Miami and had her first solo exhibition there in 2019. Rodríguez Jiménez is

currently a 2020-2022 Fulbright Research Fellow for Brazil and an Assistant Professor at The

Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Hartmut Austen (born 1967, Germany) studied painting and drawing at University of the Arts

in Berlin. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Germany. He has had recent solo

exhibitions at Haus zur Glocke (Steckborn, Switzerland), OnArte (Minusio, Switzerland), and

McMullen Museum of Art (Boston). In 2009, Austen was awarded a Kresge Arts in Detroit

Fellowship and was the Grant Wood Fellow at the University of Iowa in 2012/13. He is

currently an Assistant Professor in Painting at Boston College.

Olga Viso is a curator, writer, and contemporary art historian based at Arizona State

University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts in Tempe, Arizona. She was executive

director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 2008 to 2017 and director/curator at the

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, from 1995 to 2007. She is a

scholar of contemporary and Latin American Art, with a focus on the contemporary art of

Cuba. She has organized major survey exhibitions on artists Ana Mendieta, Jim Hodges and

Juan Francisco Elso. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, ArtNews, Museum,

and Arts Asia Pacific.

From Viso’s essay in the catalog, published by Terzo Piano in 2021:

The impetus to bring Austen and Rodríguez Jiménez together at Terzo Piano was as an

intuitive response. It was the result of an invitation from Giorgio Furioso to propose a duet

between two artists I appreciated, who might be unfamiliar to DC audiences and whose

works would have resonance in a city with such a venerable tradition of abstraction and

color field painting. While my choice was clear from the start, in the midst of the protests

and pandemic, I struggled with what it meant to curate a show that centered abstract

voices, especially when there was so much tangible concrete pain and reality everywhere.

What did it mean to make art (especially abstract art) in this confusing moment, in the

aftermath of disease and social unrest, and exhibit it in the capital city following the

Capitol insurrection?

Did it matter that the artists did not know each other or have any particular relationship

to DC? Did the fact that they came from different generations and cultural backgrounds

have any bearing that might lead me to reconsider the choice? In this moment of

reckoning around race and gender, could I ensure that their individual subjectivities would

be preserved and reflected and not get lost or become essentialized? In reflecting on

Austen’s and Rodríguez Jiménez’s respective practices, I pondered the rich tensions

between figure and ground. I thought about the courageous ways they use paint and

employ materials and color. I also considered what was legible in each of their works and

what each chose to make visible or maintain just below the surface.