felipe baeza
1987, Celaya, Mexico.
Fusing collage, painting, printmaking, and other techniques, Felipe Baeza creates multilayered, textural works exploring notions of the body and migration. Baeza’s sensually rich and visually arresting works evoke both mythic dimensions and contemporary themes. He depicts figures within densely layered paintings, portraying them in different states of becoming and at times abstracting them to the point of invisibility. Baeza’s figures are hybrid,“fugitive,” and “unruly,” merging the human and the non-human to create fantastical images that conjure realms of myth, spirit, and imagination. Untethered to specific temporal or spatial referents, Baeza's figures construct alternative possibilities for themselves as autonomous and multi-networked subjects. As the artist explains of his own fascination with the fragmented body, “If queerness were a project, the project would never be complete. It’s this incompleteness that allows for imagination.”
Baeza received a B.F.A. from Cooper Union and an M.F.A. from Yale University. He has participated in the Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva, FL (2024), Federico Sevilla Sierra residency, Mullowney Printing, Portland, OR (2023), and the Lower East Side Keyholder Residency, New York (2010). Baeza has been awarded fellowships such as the Latinx Artist Fellowship, US Latinx Art Forum (2023), NXTHVN Studio Fellowship Program, New Haven, CT (2019), and The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation Traveling Fellowship (2017). In 2022, he was a guest scholar at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Baeza had been awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2018), The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Full Tuition), New York (2005), and the Michael S. Vivo Prize for Drawing (2009).
Baeza’s work is included in the collections of various institutions, such as: Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA), CA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Baeza lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
unrecognizable form, refusing to be governed, 2022. ink, embroidery, acrylic, graphite, varnish, and cut paper on panel. 20 x 16 inches
the self must create its own reason for being, 2022. ink, acrylic, varnish, glitter, graphite, and cut paper on panel. 24 x 18 inches
emerging in difference, 2022. ink, graphite, glitter, interference powder, twine, acrylic, and cut paper on paper. 78 3/4 x 51 1/2 inches
a self that is not quite here but always in process, 2022. cast lead crystal glass. 17 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches (left arm), 16 x 5 inches (right arm)
tanto refugio como advertencia a la vez, 2019.
fogata, 2019
naj tunich azul 1, 2018
mujer arrodillada (gente del occidente de méxico), 2017-2019. collage on paper. 8 3/4 x 6 3/8 inches
post-colonial object of desire 5, 2015. collage on paper. 11 x 8 inches
post colonial object of desire 1, 2015
objeto de la nueva españa 2, 2010
actos santos 3, 2007.
installation view the milk of dreams, la biennale di venezia, 2022. photo: roberto marossi
installation view narrative threads, fiber art today, moody center for the arts, 2023. photo: sean fleming
unruly forms II, 2022. © felipe baeza. courtesy maureen paley, london. photo: nicholas knight, courtesy public art fund, ny. presented by publicart fund as a part of felipe baeza: unruly forms, an exhibition on 400+ jcdecauxbus shelters and street furniture in new york, boston, and chicago in the united states and mexico city, león, and querétaro in mexico, august 9–november 19, 2023
Past solo exhibitions include: Made Into Being, Fortnight Institute, New York (2022); Unruly Suspension, Maureen Paley, London (2021); Through the Flesh to Elsewhere, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2020); La Emergencia de Hacer Memoria, Fortnight Institute, New York (2019); and Felipe Baeza, Maureen Paley, London (2018).
Past group exhibitions include: I Feel You, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv, Ukraine (2024); Artefact 2024: At the Still Point of the Turning World, Stuk Arts Center, Leuven, Belgium (2024); Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA (2024); Following the Body, Fragment Gallery, New York (2023); Excavated Selves: Becoming Magic Bodies, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, Alchemy Gallery, New York (2023); outer view, inner world, Maureen Paley: Morena di Luna, Hove, England (2023); Aesthetics of Undocumentedness, Ruffin Gallery, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA (2023); The dreamers, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York (2023); The Tale their Terror Tells, Lyles & King, New York (2022); Finding Home in My Own Flesh (temporary wall mural), Desert X, Coachella Valley, Palm Springs, CA (2021); RAÍZ, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito, Ecuador (2021); View From Here, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2020); A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience; 20 Years of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA (2020); Right Behind Your Eyes, Capsule, Shanghai, China (2019); Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall Era, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2019); Underlying Borders, The Mexican Cultural Institute, Washington, D.C. (2019); XL Catlin Art Prize, organized by San Francisco Art Institute, CA, and travelled to Linda Warren Projects, Chicago, IL, and New York Academy of Art (2018); among others.
Baeza participated in the The Milk of Dreams as part of the the 59th Venice Biennale (2022).
