May 14 - July 11, 2009

Ooi Botos Gallery is pleased to announce new paintings, works on paper, and photographs by Brooklyn based artist, José Parlá. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong.

The exhibition is presented during the Hong Kong International Art Fair and it will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by scholars, Alexandra Chang - New York University Asia Pacific Center, and art theorist and historian, Michael Betancourt.

Aspects of Parlá’s new works recall his unique and playful inscriptions, diary like gestures with his trademark hand-writing used to document his observations of precise study and specific effects of the geographical environment in the urban landscape by the behavior of anonymous individuals on the streets in recent travels to France, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

Memories, thoughts, ideas, quotes, phrases, conversations and observations scrawled in a flowing mode reflect Parlá’s characteristic fusion of writing and painting, word and image.

His brushwork depicts walls out in the city or rural areas wherever he might be traveling through together with worlds of words that hint to stories within stories and evoke the places he has visited.

José Parlá was born in 1973 in Miami, and studied at The Savannah College of Art & Design in Georgia and at The New World School of the Arts in Miami. Following travels in the Caribbean, South America, Asia and Europe, Parlá settled permanently in New York. He has exhibited his work extensively since the early 90s.

His work has been collected and shown by Agnes B., Galerie Du Jour in Paris, and Takashi Murakami’s Kai Kai Ki Ki gallery in Tokyo. Major recent exhibitions include, The New Grand Tour showing in Hong Kong and Beijing (2007-08), Adaptation / Translation at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms in London (2008), and Layered Days with the Cristina Grajales gallery in New York City (2008).

www.joseparla.com

www.ooibotos.com