The Awakening
Condition reports and provenance available upon request
About This Work
José Parlá’s *The Awakening* distils the artist’s signature fusion of calligraphy, abstraction, and urban palimpsest into a resonant contemporary painting. Built through layered washes, scumbled pigment, and gestural mark-making, the surface reads like a weathered wall—inscribed with fragments of text, erased histories, and rhythmic traces of movement. Parlá’s technique mirrors the tempo of the city, where language, architecture, and identity continuously overwrite one another. The work’s chromatic strata and lyrical line evoke both improvisational music and street signage, situating it within global dialogues on migration, memory, and cultural hybridity. At once intimate and monumental, *The Awakening* offers a tactile meditation on place, time, and the politics of public space.
About the Artist
José Parlá (born 1973 in Miami), is a Brooklyn-based contemporary artist whose work has been described as "lying between the boundary of abstraction and calligraphy." Parlá is publicly known for his permanent installations of large-scale paintings. In 2013 he painted the mural Nature of Language at ...
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Contemporary Art • Hampstead, London
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