Chapter NY is pleased to present Beyond the Fence, Miguel Cárdenas’s first exhibition with the gallery.

Cárdenas’s multimedia practice combines painting, drawing, sculpture, video animations and wall murals to create immersive environments. Filled with art historical references to the ancient Pre-Columbian era and European modernism, his work merges elements of realism and abstraction to create mysteriously futuristic compositions. Cárdenas renders his subjects in impossible perspectives, setting otherworldly stages for his imagined creatures and vegetation to come to life.

For this exhibition, Cárdenas will create a site-specific wall mural as a backdrop for his newest anthropomorphic sculptures of deconstructed animal forms. His accompanying paintings and drawings depict lush vegetation, an unusual cast of imagined characters, and futuristic archeological objects that wait silently to be decoded.

In his paintings, Cárdenas interweaves architectural and organic elements to compose each imagined scene. Doorways, windows, fences, and curtains suggest the presence of further spaces beyond view, through which one reality may give way to another. In his painting, Beyond the Fence (2021), which shares the title of the exhibition, Cárdenas portrays a permeable barrier between two worlds – one pervaded by an overgrown landscape, the other punctured by geometric objects strewn on a green synthetic lawn.

In The Brink (2020), a cabin precariously balances atop a vast landscape. One of the artist’s characteristic bird-like creatures holds onto a sphere, a pendulous weight that keeps the structure from plummeting from its perch. Inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s film The Gold Rush (1925), this painting conjures an archetypal scene that remains particularly poignant given the precarity of the present day.

Miguel Cárdenas (b. Bogotá, Colombia) lives and works in Bogotá and New York. He received his MFA from Columbia University in 2005 and his BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1996. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Licenciado, Mexico City (2021); La Balsa Arte, Bogotá (2020); and with Koppe Astner, Glasgow at Metro Pictures, New York as part of Condo New York 2019. His work has been exhibited widely in Colombia and is included in the permanent collections of Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, Bogotá, Colombia; Museo de Arte de Pereira, Colombia; and Museo de Arte Moderno de Cartagena, Colombia.