Painting Now Forever

November 23, 2024 - Janurary7th 2025

Painting Now Forever Curated by Charo Oquet

Participating Artists: Gabriela Ayza | Nicole Burko |Edouard Duval - Carrie| Alejandra Gotera | | Jaime Grant | Brigette Hoffman |   David Marsh | Emilio Martinez |  Victor Payares | Guadalupe Reyna | Sebastian Ruiz | Lulu Sanchez | Yael Talleyrand | 

MIAMI, FL - Edge Zones is pleased to present "Painting Now Forever," a group exhibition curated by Charo Oquet, on view from November 23, 2024 to January 7, 2025. 

"Painting Now Forever" presents the work of 13 local Miami artists who are engaging with a range of styles, materials, and techniques within the medium of painting. From abstract to figurative, spatial explorations to rich fields of color, this exhibition offers a kaleidoscopic view of the varied and enduring interests in the practice of painting. In doing so, it invites the viewer to consider the evolving role and relevance of painting in contemporary art.

Conceived by artist Charo Oquet, this exhibition explores the diverse forms and expressions that painting takes in a contemporary art practice. Through Oquet's own artistic journey and shared reflections on the role an artist takes on when painting and the process as a form of mediation, change, and affect, the exhibition seeks to create a conversation around painting, the use of the medium, and the people who create it. It also examines the influence of location and context, particularly how the unique light, culture, and proximity to Latin America and the Caribbean in Miami may impact the participating artists' work.

The exhibition showcases how these artists have played with the medium to animate and expand their art practices. Painting has been part of visual expression for centuries, but it was not until the 1980s that the medium began to re-proliferate after the emergence of conceptual art in the 1960s. The artists in the exhibition use paint to probe philosophical questions, express and subvert political messages, challenge notions of identity, and connect their artwork with multiple references, and cultural icons. The goal of art is to make people think and question things, not to provide definitive answers. Art gives people the tools to explore and understand their own perspectives on the world around them. 

This exhibition aims to spark a thought-provoking tension by highlighting the inconsistencies and contradictions in people's everyday environments. The goal is to disrupt people's automatic or habitual ways of responding, encouraging them to think more deeply about their surroundings and experiences.

Gabriela Ayza 

Gabriela Ayza Aschmann (b. 1991, Cologne, Germany) is a multidisciplinary artist of Spanish and German descent, currently based in Miami, Florida. She studied Fine Arts in Andalusia and graduated from the University of Fine Arts in Seville, Spain. Gabriela’s work reflects her cultural heritage, merging traditional influences with contemporary themes.

Since 2019, she has participated in artist residencies in Italy, Denmark, Spain, and the United States. Her work is often provocative and introspective, with solo exhibitions in Miami, including “I Have an Idiot Inside Me” and “Mom, Let Me Be an Animal for One Day." In addition to her solo practice, Gabriela has been part of numerous group exhibitions. She showcased her work at the ArteBA Art Fair in Buenos Aires in 2023, and her newest body of ceramic work, Selling Panties Edition, is currently on display at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach.

Nicole Burko 

Nicole Burko was born in Toronto, Canada, and lives and works in Miami, Florida. Burko received an MFA from Columbia University (2019) in Visual Art and a BFA from New World School of the Arts (2011) in Painting. Nicole Burko’s landscape paintings explore the limits of the natural world, the human body, and psychological depth. Rooted in her own experiences of freediving on a single breath into underwater caverns, her immersive oil paintings create a dialogue between desire, dread, and mortality. Here, there is no safe distance—no comfortable vantage point from which to observe the sublime. Instead, Burko draws viewers to the edge of the unknown, inviting them to contemplate feelings of discomfort and vulnerability as the surface recedes.

Edouard Duval - Carrie

Edouard Duval-Carrié is a contemporary artist and curator based in Miami, Florida. Born and raised in Haiti, Duval Carrié fled the regime of “Papa Doc” Duvalier as a teenager and subsequently resided in locales as diverse as Puerto Rico, New York, Montreal, Paris, and Miami.

Parallels thus emerge between the artist’s cosmopolitan lifestyle and his artistic sensitivity toward the multifaceted identities that form his native Haiti. At heart, Edouard is an educator: he challenges the viewer to make meaning of dense iconography derived from Caribbean history,

politics, and religion. His mixed media works and installations present migrations and transformations, often human and spiritual. The conceptual layering of Edouard’s works is further emphasized in his materials and through consistent attention to translucent and reflective mediums, such as glitter, glass, and resin. The introspective effects of these mediums transform his works into spatial interventions that implicate the viewer in their historicity. At their most fundamental, Edouard’s works ask the viewer to complicate the Western Canon, to consider how Africa has shaped the Americas, and how the Caribbean has shaped the modern world.

Alejandra Gotera

Alejandra Gotera (b. 1994 in Maracaibo, Venezuela) is based in Miami, Florida, and holds a BFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida (2017). Gotera’s work explores mental health, specifically how human cognition influences perception and behavior. Characterized by vibrant colors and abstract marks, both her paintings and drawings reflect the mind’s processes and the fluidity of human experience. Select duo exhibitions include Por Todas Partes (2021) at Gallery 114, HCC Ybor City, Tampa, and Tête-à-Tête (2017) at Centre Gallery, Tampa. Recent group exhibitions include Echoes: Weaving Identity and Belonging (2024) at Zhou B Art Center, Chicago, and Common Ground (2024) at Gallery 3, HCC Dale Mabry, Tampa. In 2023–2024, Gotera completed two murals for Elevate Arts Foundation as part of their program highlighting the arts’ role in education. Her work is in the permanent collection of Hillsborough Community College and private collections across Venezuela, Brazil, and the United States.

David Marsh

David Marsh was born in New Britain, CT in 1984 and has lived in Miami since 2003. He received a BFA from MIUAD in 2007, and an MFA in painting from the University of Miami in 2010.  Since moving to Miami, David has dedicated much of his time outside of painting dedicated to curating and coordinating art shows – sometimes working with galleries and with artists in the entire execution of shows. In 2006, he had his first solo show, Looking for Labels, and curated his first show, The Wild, Wild Wynwood at Edge Zones in early 2007.  Since then, David has served as an Associate Curator for Edge Zones Gallery. He also founded and directs Flowerbox Projects, located in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood for the past eight years, presenting multiple shows per year for emerging artists, curating over 30 shows over this period.

Victor Payares

Victor Payares, born in Havana, Cuba, in 1985, emigrated to the United States in 1995 during Cuba’s ‘Special Period.’ He earned a BFA on a full scholarship from the Art Institute at Miami International University of Art & Design in 2007 and an MFA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2017. From 2019 to 2021, he further honed his practice at the Berlin Program for Artists (BPA). Through painting and sculpture, Payares delves into themes of memory and visual dialogue, crafting work that resonates with personal and collective histories.

Yael Talleyrand

Yaël Talleyrand was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1993, and she currently lives and works temporarily in Miami. Raised in a family of artists, she spent her early years in Jacmel before moving to Cleveland, Ohio, at sixteen. Yaël studied Video Production at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she also immersed herself in painting and drawing.

Talleyrand’s work explores the stories of Haitian women and the depth of black culture, with a strong focus on spirituality, particularly Haitian Vodou. Through vibrant, layered compositions, she delves into the intersections of identity and the spiritual traditions that shape her heritage. While oil painting is her primary medium, Talleyrand is also a photographer and digital artist, capturing the same themes through a different lens.

Her art has been exhibited widely, with shows in Haiti, France, Italy, and the United States, offering audiences a window into the power, and complexity of Haitian spirituality and culture.

Brigette Hoffman 

Brigette Hoffman was born in 1991 in Miami, Fl. where she currently lives and works. Hoffman completed her BFA at The Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg, Germany (HFBK). Her first institutional exhibition was held at The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, DE in 2019 titled ''ALLES KNETTEN, Metamorphose eines Materials''. She has exhibited in Miami, New York, Hamburg, Berlin and Leipzig. Her work draws on figurative sculpture, physical animation, and painting. She blends references on themes like play, domesticity and the family, money and materiality, death, and the divine.

Emilio Martinez 

American artist Emilio Martinez was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 1981 and immigrated with his family to Miami, USA, in 1994, where he has resided ever since. Emilio has adopted painting as his means of expression. His work comes to life through the presence of the dream realm – created by the constant repetitive dreams of his childhood memories. The work comes to life through the bicultural puzzle he decodes daily.

As a child, he used a sketchbook in which he recorded his obsessions, passions and fears. Macabre fantasies of fanged beasts and shadowy figures unfold on the busy surfaces of the paintings, depicted in a visual language of bold brushstrokes influenced by 20th-century figurative expressionism.

His paintings question the ambiguous moralities endemic to humanity, and how things are rarely what they seem. How can a beautiful scene camouflage horrors; while ugliness can prevent us from seeing virtue, charm, and merit hidden just beneath the surface? In his pictorial practice, Martinez freely navigates these zones of nuance, creating in his works frameworks for introspection into motivations and intentions – whether good or bad or somewhere in between. He leads his audience to ask the same questions far beyond the confines of these works.

Guadalupe Reyna 

Guadalupe Reyna is a visual artist born in Argentina in 1991. She resides in Miami where she continues developing her creative practices and different projects as part of the art community. The first tools that forged her expressive and creative freedom were provided by an experimental workshop she attended when she was 7. Since then, she never stopped exploring different artistic languages such as sculpture, painting, photography. In love with nature, she maintains a basis of respect and care for it in each of the activities that she undertakes. In her work she tries to recognize the life cycles she experiences in her own body, using the growth of plants and the interrelationship of bees and their link with the environment as a guide to her practice. Her artistic production delves into themes such as feminine energy, eroticism, pleasure, and power.

Lulu Sanchez 

Lulu Sanchez (b. 1992 Miami Beach, FL) is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist based in Miami, Florida. Her painting and sculpture practice sees diaristic visual elements merge with a conceptual focus in a painterly exploration of color and form. Influenced by a vibrant artistic lineage and marked by experiences of loss, she embraces the duality therein. Her story can be traced from Miami to NYC, and from Camagüey, Cuba, to Northern Minnesota. Sanchez earned a degree from The Cooper Union in New York City in 2016, and has studied abroad at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Holland and the European Exchange Academy in Germany. She has worked as an artist assistant to Margaret Morton, Mira Lehr, Molly Lowe, Camilla Huey, Robin Kang, K8 Hardy, and Maripol, as well as Kenny Scharf, Dustin Yellin, Andy Cross and Roberto and Rosario of R&R Studios. Lucia can be found exhibiting locally, and internationally, featured in the Craig Robins Collection, and at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, MOCA North Miami, BakeHouse Art Complex, Diana Lowenstein Gallery, Walgreens Windows by the Bass Museum, Superchief Gallery at AquaArt Fair, 777 International Mall, Product 81 Creative Lab, and at Swampspace Gallery. She participated in the 2nd edition of By&For Auction curated by Laura Novoa and Luna Goldberg, and BluPrnt Curated by Robert Chambers. While living in NY from 2011-2018 Lucia co-organized Hosting Projects ‘a weekend residency’ at home, and in turn participated in the apartment-gallery style shows of her peers, as well as Chinatown Soup, Sleep Center, Group Partner Ceramics, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and in several NY Historic House Museums in Harlem and Inwood. Sanchez set up shop and took part in a collective artist-run studio building in Brooklyn, contributing to the programming and development of the facilities there. Abroad she has participated in art and performance festivals at De Brakke Grond in Amsterdam, Bridewell Studios in Liverpool, and at Beelitz Heilstätten in Germany. In 2023 she presented her first Museum Solo Exhibition entitled ADOLFOLAND, at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, curated by Ariella Wolens and Director Bonnie Clearwater.