On Wednesday, December 1st, the Coral Gables Museum opened the exhibition, ‘Julio Larraz: The Kingdom We Carry Inside’ in collaboration with the Julio Larraz Foundation. Taking over the main three temporary galleries of the Museum, the show is the first museum retrospective of Larraz in the United States and will be on view through April 30th, 2022.
On that evening, a special viewing of Larraz’s latest video, Astral Flight (2021) by Ari Larraz, Laura Furcic, and Las Animas Films was held in the Museum’s courtyard.
As part of Art Basel Miami Beach morning schedule of events, the Museum hosted a Brunch and Book Launch of Rizzoli’s retrospective publication ‘Julio Larraz: The Kingdom We Carry Inside’ on Saturday, December 4th. With 200 paintings, 50 works on paper, and 10 sculptures ranging from the 1960s to the present, this is the most comprehensive book on the artist to date.
“As it is customary now, the Museum organizes a brunch on the last day of Art Basel Miami Beach as part of the Fair’s morning schedule of events. For us, this collaboration is very important as it attracts other people than our regular public, and doubles the impact of our show,” said Jose Valdes-Fauli, Coral Gables Museum’s Chairman.
“This exhibition has been much-expected. We have received amazing feedback from the public, and the numbers speak by themselves - even when there was a lot to see in the city during Miami Art Week we had over 500 attendees on those two days alone. We are looking forward to many more successful events in the months to come,” said John R. Allen, Coral Gables Museum’s Executive Director.
The Museum has announced a series of Curator Tours led by Chief Curator Yuni Villalonga that will take place during Gallery Nights (the first Fridays of the month,) starting on January 7th, 2022.
“These tours will offer an additional insight on the artist. Beside interesting anecdotes and stories that couldn’t be captured in the exhibition, we will have available facsimile copies of important catalogues in Larraz’s career that the public will be able to check out during the tours,” says curator Yuni Villalonga and adds, “We will soon announce other upcoming related events.”
Artist Julio Larraz (b. Havana, Cuba, 1944) is one of the most influential figures in Latin American art today. Throughout a career of six decades, institutional recognition has gone hand in hand with the admiration and following of colleagues and many younger painters from all over the world that praise his mastery of technique, color and light, and the poetry and subtlety of his work.
The show gathers works that span from Larraz’s early days in New York, as a caricaturist for major newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vogue, to the drawings, paintings and sculptures realized in New Mexico, Paris and Florence, as well as in Miami, where the artist currently lives and works. Pieces are drawn from private and public collections, as well as from the Larraz family collection and archives, to represent all themes, mediums and key time periods of the artist’s life and oeuvre.
“Among the selection, there are important works in the artist’s life and career, such as his 1969 depictions of spacecraft Apollo 11’s launch from Cape Kennedy, while being one of the few selected artists to witness the moment when humans first landed on the moon; or the painting that represents Larraz in the CINTAS Foundation’s collection after a 1975 Cintas Award,” says curator Yuni Villalonga.
Coral Gables Museum is located at 285 Aragon Avenue, Coral Gables, Florida.
