Andrew Edlin Gallery Presents Armando Reverón: Prisoner of the Air
Armando Reverón: Prisoner of the Air
April 17 – May 31, 2025
Andrew Edlin Gallery
212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012
Prisoner of the air,
you are now in its whistling,
which dins you,
and in the silenced weft of time,
nothing sustains you:
only the voice that summons you to walk
over the spume
only the travelling chant that announces you
a fishing of clouds, miraculous.¹
Luis Pérez-Oramas, Prisoneiro del aire, 2008
Armando Reverón. La Cueva (1920). Oil on canvas, 41 x 61.81 inches
New York, NY – April 2, 2025 – Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present Armando Reverón: Prisoner of the Air, the first solo exhibition of Armando Reverón (1889-1954) in the United States since his retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) in 2007. Prisoner of the Air will include 19 paintings and drawings created between 1920 and 1955. The exhibition will open Thursday, April 17 from 6-8pm and will be on view through May 31, 2025.
As noted by MASP (Museum of Art São Paolo) curator Mateus Nunes, PhD, in his exhibition essay, “Despite his rare recognition outside Latin America, particularly beyond his home country of Venezuela, Reverón’s oeuvre stands as an essential body of work in the discourse of modern art. The complexity of an artist who received formal artistic training in Caracas, Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris was overshadowed by the constructed image of an eccentric, misunderstood genius living in isolation in a hut on the Caribbean coast—an image often reinforced by Reverón himself, who was fascinated by the theatricalization of his own existence.”
Prisoner of the Air features works from what is considered Reverón’s most recognizable period of “white landscapes” as well as lesser-known yet critically significant moments in his career. Perhaps his most famous work is La Cueva (The Cave, 1920), in which ghostly, reclining muses emerge from a blue haze. The two women are veiled, and one wears an almost-obscured crucifix. La Cueva was in part influenced by his time in Spain, where he studied under José Ruiz Blasco – the father of Pablo Picasso – and immersed himself in the theatricality and intensity of works by Francisco de Goya.
In 1921, Reverón moved with his lifelong partner and model, Juanita Ríos, to Macuto, a coastal Caribbean village, in part to escape the political chaos of the capital. There, they built a hut on the beach called El Castillete (The Little Castle) where he produced striking white –almost monochromatic—landscapes exploring the dazzling light and shadow of the shore. Included in Prisoner of Air, the paintings Vista de Playón (Beach View, 1929), Litoral Guaireño (Guaireño coastline, 1943), and Muelle de Las Goletas (Las Goletas Pier, 1941) all feature delicate washes that blend into the surface of the canvas. Nunes writes, “By understanding the disappearance of the visible as the body of its own medium, unconcerned with resolving the grand problems and theories of modernity, Reverón strikes at the heart of the conditions of modern art.”
A last series of self-portraits, including Autorretrato con pumpá (Self-Portrait with Top Hat, 1947), features the same pose repeated over varying backgrounds both indoors and outdoors. Towards the end of his life, Reverón preferred to paint interior scenes to escape the blinding tropical heat. In another late work included in Prisoner of Air, Desnudo (Nude, 1948), the background includes the curtain system Reverón built in El Castillete to illuminate his nude models and filter his favorite subject, the shining sun of the Macuto coast.
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About Andrew Edlin Gallery
Established in 2001, Andrew Edlin Gallery gained early recognition exhibiting the works of both emerging and seminal self-taught American artists, and European art brut masters. In 2006, the gallery was awarded exclusive representation of the Henry Darger Estate.
In subsequent years, AEG has championed significant yet under-recognized artists from the 20th and 21st centuries and has steadily produced critically acclaimed exhibitions featuring the works of both trained and untrained artists, including Thornton Dial, Ralph Fasanella (estate), Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (estate), Marcel Storr (estate), Beverly Buchanan (estate), Paulina Peavy (estate), Spain Rodriguez (estate), Joe Coleman, Tom Duncan, Karla Knight, Terence Koh, Dan Miller, Esther Pearl Watson, Melvin Way, and Domenico Zindato. Committed to documentation and research, AEG has produced publications for Darger, Dial, Duncan, Fasanella, Von Bruenchenhein, Storr, Knight, Peavy, and Zindato, and is in the midst of a major monograph project for Buchanan.
AEG has participated in Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Basel Paris, Frieze (NY and LA), The Art Show (ADAA), Independent and the Outsider Art Fair, among other art fairs. The gallery is a member of the Art Dealers Association of America.
For more information, visit https://www.edlingallery.com/.
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