OPENING: Thursday, May 12, 5:00 - 9:00 p.m.

Upstream Gallery is proud to present the work of Juan Parada (BR, 1979) in Upstream Focus, a series of exhibitions in the gallery's private viewing space. This is the first time that the work of the Brazilian artist is shown in The Netherlands. The exhibition opens during Amsterdam Art Week, simultaneously with Jen Liu's solo exhibition ELECTROPORE.

Graduating from the Escola de Belas Artes do Paraná in 2002, Juan Parada began his research in ceramics in 2003. Since then he has been working with installations, sculptures and urban interventions. His practice revolves mainly around questions of three-dimensionality and the relationship between time and space, engaging in a dialogue with architecture. A selection of Parada's Geometric Reliefs will be shown at Upstream Gallery. This series of works explores graphic-sculptural issues in ceramic reliefs. They are the first results from Parada’s artist-in-residence at the EKWC, an international artist-in-residence and centre-of-excellence for ceramics.

Parada: ‘I explore a graphic-sculptural language which might be perceived as a flattened sculpture or an expanded drawing. Sometimes I experience these topographic surfaces like a geographical relief. At other times, I see them as fluidic surfaces or natural patterns like the skin of a reptile. The work starts digitally in the form of a digital project. With drawing software I create a series of lines, then I multiply, overlap, and recombine them until I reach a mesh - a weave that I consider interesting. Then the drawing is transferred to a clay panel. From that moment on the work progresses in a very handmade and analog way.’

 Source: Simões de Assis