Exhibition Dates: OCTOBER 26 - NOVEMBER 30, 2024

Public Reception:  Saturday, OCTOBER 25, 4 - 6 PM
Flatbed is excited to announce our upcoming exhibition with Enrique Figueredo. Figueredo will be exhibiting his stunning installation of new woodcuts in his upcoming exhibition titled, And the Valley Froze Over. 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, migration, power—and relates those incidents to the visual history of ancient civilizations, the colonization of the Americas, and mythology.

Featured in this exhibition is Figueredo’s Pasó por aquí woodcut and frottage series, which was printed by Figueredo 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 carved inscriptions left by the Conquistadors on the sandstone bluffs nearby.  

Three of Figueredo’s most recent large scale woodcuts will be shown for the first time. The monumental woodcuts which resemble altarpieces and measure 60 x 39 1/2 inches are from the Federación Venezolana de Bobsleigh series, inspired by the artist’s childhood dream of piloting a make-believe bobsleigh team at the Winter Olympics. This 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.  

The compositions of these woodcuts are borrowed from the traditional aesthetic of altarpieces created by late medieval Italian painters Giotto and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Reinterpretations of 16th-century engravings by Theodor de Bry depicting expeditions into South America are also  folded into the narrative. The prints illuminate figurative mark-making of iconic landscapes in  Venezuela inhabited by Spanish Conquistadors, English explorers, oil tankers, and mythical figures like the king of El Dorado. The large scale signifies the grandeur associated with religious work, and as a result, lends authenticity to the veracity of the satirical and constructed allegories. Together, the fantastical imagery conveys the push-and-pull of a homeland affected by a migration crisis, political turmoil, and the plight of abundant natural resources. They retell well-known historical lore, point to past and present global commodities and economies, and map out Figueredo’s ancestral, personal, and religious experience activated by the persona of a time-traveling, Venezuelan-American bobsledder.

The public is welcome to the opening reception on October 26 from 4 - 6 pm at Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking.

Gallery Hours

Monday: By appointment

Tuesday-Friday: 10am-5pm

Saturday: 12pm-5pm

Sunday: Closed