New Works by Juliana Bukowitz, Summer 2025

Catalog Foreword

“If you’re not…speaking to what is happening in the moment you are not relevant…anyone who is making these kinds of films that isn’t speaking to young people today is not serving the community, the audience, and not serving history. I am a servant of history.” -Sacha Jenkins

In this summer catalog, we highlight urgent works by Brazilian-born artist Juliana Bukowitz, works that challenge us profoundly, that call into question the disintegration of our age, that speak to a time when the very maintenance of the body became politic, when artists met the moment at their most aggressive, in their most retaliatory state, or risked erasure.

Like the prescient words of the late Sacha Jenkins, this selection of works, largely complex ceramics and sculpture, wield armament in themselves. They commute us from the familiar Things They Carried of our daily battles, and give expression to this immediate period, this time where our hands themselves became the treasures. These pieces forge their own existence alongside the chainsaw-weilding, content-deluged zeitgeist of the day. They insist, press, and contort like the pygmy seahorse veterans of might makes right, earthen testimony to the trenches, tombs and reincarnations of our everyday soldier, our everyman.

At this moment, in the instancia cruxis of 2025, we must insist on the indespensable nature of those hands, of the works of our hands, on the freedom to encounter material or texture before meaning, or meaning before material as determined by that human nature, that fortune we still carry.

A posteriori we will remember what these works whispered to us as they reached into and past this moment and reminded us to carry ourselves boldly in our insistence, to sheath ourselves in those overlooked, non-leasable, non-clickbaitable shreds of materiality that made the next day humanly possible.

Gined López Ganem

Miami, FL, United States of America

May 27, 2025

Founder, GG Art Space

cc: Catalog

That season brought color. Color spoke first, and she saw that it was good…

I was on one of my usual constitutional walks in a certain tree-ripened South Florida neighborhood when I received a hurried call from Hollye Davidson about the birth of this new series.  Of course, as we spoke, neither of us was aware that we were dealing with a birth, or a series, or even a change of headwinds of any kind.  The artist had simply been ruminating on yellows and had spent quite some time preparing a full canvas of the color in that state of communion that so characterizes painters, and so I thought to myself, “it’s sunny out with an 80 percent chance of Rothko so this chat isn’t a scorcher”.  The next thing I knew a week had passed, and our facetime call drew an unexpected interference. 

A human face had emerged on the canvas, and its impact was downright phantasmagorical.  For the rest of that month, Davidson found herself in a struggle with her practice, an encounter that became a series of spiraling inquiries, invitations, and more self-cross examinations than a jury of one could truly follow.  The resulting Portrait of Barbara emerged, a painterly and formal self-sentencing that loomed over the artist’s emerging color-first instincts.

For an artist so centered around her subjects, often human, mostly figurative, this notion of color as the primary protagonist began to persist in Davidson’s process.  This time around, she turned to face it, to give instinct its due place.  The result is this new series where human faces emerge from the color, the subtext, the undertone, and not the other way around.  With Waterlily, the painter was drawn to experience a very particular blue-green from Monet’s palette, and the countenance appears, floating upon the color with a spontaneity that evokes childlike integrity for the viewer. 

Other works, such as Close Reach, emerge as tactical expressions, offering a contemplation of color’s effect on the inner aspects of the subject. The delicate Fifth Season allows the subject’s soft expression to flow with a rare casualness that stands in quiet contrast to the comedian-on-wall driven, self-regurgitating art world extravaganzas that have been duct taped to our collective consciousness. 

This season’s works by Davidson and the exhibition  Let’s Face It: Embodying Color asks to be experienced in person, it calls us to gather around its colors, to be lighthearted for a moment, it insists on the value of the human experience as a central focus and a subject to be celebrated.  So join me on this walk, this synch we are encountering, in vivo, as we meet and greet the 2024 collection of faces by South Florida’s own Hollye Davidson during Miami Art Week.

Gined López Ganem

Miami, Florida, December 2024

Most sensible folks would probably delay the prospect of a stroll through the sticky summer swelter of downtown Coral Gables until at least 4pm, but Alberto and I admit to a kamikaze streak, and so we showed up to artist Hollye Davidson’s new studio in the heart of the city beautiful daringly close to the stroke of midday in early June.

The walls are an afterthought in this new space, and the expansive windows of the main studio endow it with a dramatic natural illumination that at once grounds and exhilarates the visitor. And this prepotency of light is as much a relief as the soothing presence of the artist herself. Her canvasses are presented on large easels across the main room as secondary actors, inviting the visitor to saunter and admire. In a contemporary art world obsessed with conceptual translation, with the need for continual intercessions, indulgences, rituals, and liturgies from experts that convey the intentions of artists to their audiences, Davidson appeals as directly to her viewer as the light will allow. In my mind, her work forms part of a necessary renewal and Reformation, the voice of an American artist unabashedly shaped by the traditions of Impressionism, Expressionism, and figuration who can “awaken” her viewer in a vernacular manner, in the vulgate language of intelligible forms.

Hollye Davidson is a Miami-based artist whose work has been featured in galleries and public works throughout the city and internationally. In portraiture, still life, and renderings of nature, the artist brings a steadfast concern with sublimating the emergence of form, with form as direct contact, with contact as distilled simplicity, with simplicity as nimble provocateur.

In a welcome departure from what art historian Fernando Castro Florez has called our era of “post-truth”, these distinctly feminine forms of insinuation and intimation, this minimalism of line and form, bring us to an easy sense of gratitude, to a harbor of resolute hope, to an unexpected glimmer of grace. Is there room for such optimism in the world of AI doomsayers and warlord eco-saboteurs? Can we trust our instincts with such a direct aesthetic appeal or will we hold fast to the crutches of art world babel fish? Let us know in the comments below. You can experience more work by the artist here.

Instagram: @hollyedavidsonart

See more works: HollyeDavidson.com

Lunacy In the Sphere, 2011

There is a ritornello here. A subtext where cultural memory calls us to interact with this piece as improvisational observers for its expression to be complete. This pattern is what makes Locura en la Esfera, 2011 (Lunacy in the Sphere, 2011) by Cuban-born painter Orlando Silvera Hernández at once so familiar, so universal, and so distinctly discoverable.

A vast sphere, marked by painted carnival figures in their most recognizable clown incarnations, beguiles us on this canvas, with the timeless sense of possible entrapment so common to that which is deliberately hidden. Should we uncover these kitschy red noses, or should we accept them as the foibles of fate? The surreal palm endowed with an anthropomorphic trunk seems to challenge such unmasking with a hard stare. And here the improvisational viewer retreats and migrates through the movement of the work.

Detail from Lunacy In the Sphere

Migration. When has this topic been more pressing? Migration strikes at the heart of this canvas. How should we approach a figuration so endemic to a particular isle of the Caribbean when the spheres of the unknown surround so many places? Is our wandering improvisation left to pursue a headless ruse?

Of the Cuban flora and fauna represented in the work, birds seem to have the strongest stories. We are presented with a Cuban tody or Cartacuba, partly supported by a palm frond, various migratory birds, and brushstrokes suggesting wind and flight. Yet the only figure left in full outline is the glittering emerald Cuban amazon with its rose-colored throat, ready to repeat what it must, ready to adapt, to insist on survival, however domestic, however alien. And yet she slips to the wind in her translucence, along with our gaze.

Detail from Lunacy In the Sphere

The ritorno effect brings us back to the carnival, and we shift once again to the realm of sensation, unsure of what is or what will be repeated or re-patterned, persisting in the absence of logic, in the absence of reason, driven to inevitable flight.

Lunacy In the Sphere, 2011

Gined López Ganem

Founder, GG Art Space

Miami, FL, USA, November 11, 2021

Lunacy In the Sphere Exhibition History:

“Mea Culpa” solo expo, Espacio Galería Librería, La Moderna Poesía, Havana, Cuba 2011

“Muraleando” Galería Proyecto Comunitario, Havana, Cuba 2013

El Bunker Art Space Miami, FL, USA 2017

Orlando Silvera Hernandez

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