Dame Dos, 2024, woodcut, 60 x 39.5 paper size, edition of 5.
Enrique Figueredo is bringing his stunning installation of woodcuts to Flatbed. Enrique Figueredo is a Venezuelan-American artist who immigrated from South America at a young age. Figueredo’s work looks closely at the forces and issues affecting today’s world—economy, religion, immigration, power—and relates those incidents to the visual history of ancient civilizations, the colonization of the Americas, and mythology.
Featured at Flatbed will be Figueredo’s PASÓ POR AQUÍ woodcut and frotage series which Engrique printed at Flatbed while in residency as the 2023 Jerry Manson Resident. This series incorporates his woodcut images of historical Spanish missions that were established in the wake of the Conquistadors along with rubbings of the carved “Pasó por Aqui” messages left by the Conquistadors on the sandstone bluffs nearby. Figueredo’s newest woodcut altarpieces will also make their debut. The three altarpieces which measure 60 x 39 1/2 inches each combine images of historic and contemporary figures set as saints into a Gothic chapel niche. Figueredo’s iconography gives homage to the indigenous source of wealth that was taken by the conquerors. "Dame Dos” translates as “Give me two” and his visual narrative plays on the phrase.
Figueredo’s new “altarpieces,” from the Federación Venezolana de Bobsleigh. series will make their debut in this exhibition. The woodcuts of this highly ambitious and imaginative series were inspired by the artist’s childhood fantasy of piloting a make-believe bobsleigh team at the Winter Olympics. The fantasy became a metaphor that suggests the dizzying, winding, high-velocity descent from the top to the bottom that mirrors the cycle of Venezuelan prosperity and hyper-inflation. Characters in the series include four veiled athletes representing the artist and his family as “resident aliens” who navigate a dangerous course between two countries.
Figueredo studied at Purchase College (SUNY) earning a BFA in 2004, with a printmaking concentration, and his MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University in 2019, where his work is in the Zimmerli Art Museum collection., VCUarts Fountainhead Fellowship in Painting and Printmaking (2019-2020), The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts: Robert Blackburn Printmaking Award (2019), and the Nadine Goldsmith Fellowship (Vermont Studio Center, 2019).