Primarily a painter of murals, paintings, and works on paper, Cuban-American artist José Parlá also produces installations, video, sculpture, and photographic works that explore or respond to urban landscapes. Parlá began painting art on the walls at age 10 and received a scholarship to Savannah College of Art & Design at only 16. Parlá’s large-scale compositions resemble city walls that, like palimpsests or psychogeographic maps, have accrued years of ephemera, posters, and fliers; he blends curvy gestures, calligraphy, and personal inscriptions with blurred color fields, using brushes, markers, spray paint, and sometimes fragments of fliers and posters. Parlá has produced several public commissions, including a giant mural at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn. “With making abstract painting,” he has said, “I felt that what I was doing and what I’m still doing is translating the many different cultures and many different languages that I’m confronting.”
