“New York State of Mind”
Harif Guzman Born 1975 born in Caracas, Venezuela to Carlos Guzman a pastor and printer. Mother Rosalba Cantillo Guzman born in Colombia raised in orphanage; half sister Adriana Guzman & Marble Guzman.
Today, New York City constitutes one of the most influential myths in the international cultural field. Over the past century, dozens of artists and authors have repeatedly referred to this image of the city of cities, seeking to capture and convey the spirit of the metropolis, modernity and personal experience of being there. New York is the main source of inspiration, motif and protagonist in the works of Harif Guzman, one of the outstanding figures of the street art scene in NY. The exhibition at MMOMA offers a large-scale panorama of different stages and facets in the evolution of his style, areas of work and spheres of interest.
Iconic, straighforward pop imagery in Harif's works is intertwined with thetexture of private testimony, aggressive street poetry meets the intimacy of personal interactions, and the media aesthetic of New York in the 2000s intersects with the biography of the artist. Genealogically related to pop-art, street art always addresses the most urgent, visible images and problems existing in the common urban space, with a particular role played by the critique of mass culture, consumerist values, the worldview of the petit bourgeois. Guzman inherits this tradition, listing Jean-Michel Basquiat,Mike Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg as his teachers. Having started his artistic practice in the 1990s, by today he has evolved from an enthusiastic skateboarder who bombs the walls and streets of New York with the name of his fictional alter ego Haculla to a wellknown artist.
In his ironic works, where chance is as significant as the author's intention, Guzman embodies the chaotic, fluid, unstable nature of the twenty-first century. Speed and free play, direct communication and direct impact are the hallmarks of his artistic strategy, in which the creative process itself is most important, the instantaneous capture of an ephemeral impression, noticed in passing and fixed in place. Although nominally the figures and details of everyday life encountered in the exhibition are related to the realities of everyday life elsewhere on earth, familiar features can be identified in them. The whole gamut of different cultural phenomena that have accompanied us in the last twenty years is reflected here in all its abundance.
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To celebrate Harif Guzman's 2021 Retrospective Show at the Museum of Modern Art Moscow, Haculla will create a 12 piece capsule collection inspired by the photography works displayed in the show. Each piece will be individually numbered and limited to 50 to 100 pieces per item. A commemorative limited edition Tyvek label will be adhered to the sleeve of each item, noting its unique number within the series. Additionally, each piece from the collection will come with an MMOMA booklet, providing a synopsis of the show and highlighting the key artworks in the exhibition.