NinaJohnson

Bhakti Baxter: ROMPELOTAS

October 7th - November 12th, 2011

ROMPELOTAS is the first Miami solo exhibition in four years for locally based artist Bhakti Baxter. The exhibition will include sculpture, painting, collage, and installation based work.

ROMPELOTAS 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.

The word ROMPELOTAS is  a play on the term rompe pelotas, which means ball breaker in Spanish.

Bhakti Baxter has exhibited at Federica Schiavo Gallery in Rome, Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery in Paris, Bravin Lee Programs, and Guild and Greyshkul 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.  This will be Baxter’s first solo exhibition at Gallery Diet.

The exhibition is being accompanied by a 120 page hard cover publication including texts by Geir Haraldseth, Gean Moreno, and Hugh Stockton.