The Standard

If you’re staying at The Standard Spa, Miami Beach in the next few weeks or just happen to be in town, we’d like to share a brilliant body of work called ROMPELOTAS to be launched this Friday by artist Bhakti Baxter. It’s the first solo exhibition in four years for the locally based artist. The exhibition will include sculpture, painting, collage, and installation based work.

The word ROMPELOTAS is a play on the phrase rompe pelotas, which means “ball breaker” in Spanish. It is a collection of work assembled through a careful balance between play and placement. Found objects such as soccer balls and office desk drawers collide with concrete and enamel to behave like irrational models of natural phenomena. Though various layers of media stack up against each other unsettlingly throughout the gallery, the work consists of very basic organic and geometric patterns such as branching,spherical implosion, vertical and panoramic support structures, both rendered and actual.

Viewed as a whole, the parts function as components of an expanded portrait, with sculptures and drawings embracing the micro and macro at every junction. Working closely with the laws of gravity, density, and the malleability of mass, Baxter transforms quotidian objects into forms imbued with metaphysical propositions, further defined by the self-made aesthetic of these forces.

Bhakti Baxter has exhibited at Federica Schiavo Gallery in Rome, Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery in Paris, Bravin Lee Programs, and Guild and Greyskhul in New York. He has also exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, where he is in the permanent collection, The Bass Museum of Art Miami Beach, The Museum of Contemporary Art Washington DC, and The Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Art. His work is also included in the permanent collection of the NOMAS Foundation in Rome. This will be Baxter’s first solo exhibition at Gallery Diet.

The exhibition is being accompanied by a hard cover publication including texts by Geir Haraldseth, Gean Moreno, and Hugh Stockton.

Opening Reception is Friday, October 7th (from 7:00 - 9:00 PM) and runs though November 12th, 2011. It will be held at Gallery Diet, which is a contemporary art gallery located in the Wynwood District of Miami.