Luis Gispert

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Luis Gispert (born Jersey City, New Jersey USA, 1972) is an American sculptor and photographer, living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Luis Gispert earned an MFA at Yale University in 2001, with a 1996 BFA in Film from Art Institute of Chicago, and attended Miami Dade College from 1990 to 1992.

Luis Gispert creates art through a wide range of media, including photographs, film, sounds, and sculptures, focusing upon hip-hop and youth culture, and Cuban-American history. Some of his sculptures incorporate objects identified with hip hop, such as turntables, chrome tire rims, and boom boxes, into functional designs usable in other manners, such as furniture. His installation art graced the 2002 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art [1], and has been exhibited internationally at galleries and museums such the Brooklyn Museum of Art [2], and the Studio Museum in Harlem [3] in New York, Art Pace [4] in Texas, the Museum of Contemporary Art [5] in Miami, the Contemporary Arts Museum [6]in Houston, Palazzo Brocherasio in Turin, and The Royal Academy [7] in London. Gispert has also participated in several exhibitions with high-profile commercial galleries including Gagosian Gallery [8], Andrea Rosen Gallery [9], and Deitch Projects [10] in New York. He is represented by Zach Feuer Gallery [11] in New York.

Hip hop music and culture are key influences in Luis Gispert’s work. His high-gloss aesthetic, fashionable appropriation of pop genres and sampled music provide a rich intellectual framework for his art. Using the concept of remixing as a critical tool, Gispert brings together disparate elements from art history and contemporary culture. Citing the current musical trend of ‘mash-ups’, a technical process where one track is mixed in its entirety with another, Gispert’s photographs and films use inferred information in their visual references.

Consciously emulating the conventions of traditional film-making, Luis Gispert’s work adapts the structures and styles of art-house cinema, yet prizes commodification over ‘artistic purity’. Equally influenced by Italian horror flicks and 1970s and 1980s sci-fi movies, his resulting aesthetic is a mesmerising blend of polished auteur staging and primitive Hollywood special effects.

Centred on the concept of sub-cultures, Gispert’s work explores the nature of identity and the social architectures that inform perception. In films such as Stereomongrel [12], Gispert uses the in-between-ness of mixed-race identity as a platform for analysis of cultural hierarchy and institutional structure. In making his photographs, Gispert collaborates on location with local people, incorporating elements of their experiences and backgrounds into his surreal narratives or ‘tribal portraits’. Through this veritas staging, Gispert creates a fictional version of reality that mirrors our own.