Manu Torres is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. His floral arrangements often involve a dialogue between the artificial and the natural, incorporating paper, fabric, paint, and feathers to imitate and exaggerate natural beauty in a hyperreal way.
The Office is an exhibition space started in 2017 by Eva Lake, inside the office at Russo Lee Gallery. This program showcasing unrepresented artists is an important moment at one of Portland’s longest running and most respected contemporary art venues, providing increased opportunities to regional artists and more artistic voices for viewers. Blake Shell, Executive Director of Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, has been asked to curate The Office for the 2018-19 season.
Focusing on presenting work by people of color and women, this season of The Office continues the work of increasing equity and inclusion that has begun at Russo Lee Gallery, lead by owner Martha Lee, as well as at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center under Shell’s direction. Shell has selected a group of artists who are unrepresented by larger commercial galleries, some who are well known regionally and some who are new to exhibiting in Portland. Artists have been selected for the high quality of their work that relates to themes of artmaking in the Pacific Northwest found at Russo Lee Gallery, such as materiality, patterned abstraction, relationships to the environment, and personal/social identities.
Manu Torres’s photographs capture his strange, sculptural flower arrangements at precise moments between efflorescence and decay. Akin to still-life paintings by Dutch artist Ambrosius Bosschaert or French artist Henri Fantin-Latour, the works speak to the vulnerability of beauty and the consumption of nature.
This new year, we resolve to see more art, foster emerging artists and support more galleries. To help reach the goal, we have rounded up nine must-see winter exhibitions.
Manu Torres, who embraces this philosophy, albeit in a much less minimalist way, underlines: “when incorporating non-floral material, I’m only trying to enhance the beauty of the more natural elements, to imitate and exaggerate their beauty in a hyperreal way as a tribute to nature.”