Cosmic Currents: Lita Albuquerque & Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.)
GAVLAK West Palm Beach
December 4 – January 4, 2024

GAVLAK West Palm Beach is pleased to present Cosmic Currents, a two-person presentation featuring recent works by multidisciplinary artists Lita Albuquerque and José Alvarez (D.O.P.A.). Known for their distinct yet complementary practices, both artists use light, materiality, and metaphysical themes to explore spirituality, cosmology, and the nature of existence. 

Albuquerque is celebrated for her large-scale ephemeral installations in natural landscapes and her deeply resonant pigment paintings, which often employ vivid colors and gold to examine humanity’s connection to the cosmos. On view are three of Albuquerque’s acclaimed Auric Field paintings, rendered in blue and silver tones, where refracted light evokes the interplay between celestial and earthly. Together, these works create a poetic meditation on light, movement, and the profound connections between humanity and the universe.

Alvarez is renowned for his vibrant mixed-media works, performances, and installations that fuse shamanic traditions with contemporary art. His kaleidoscopic mica-based collages—featuring psychedelic colors, floral motifs, and materials like crystals and porcupine quills—explore belief systems and the intersections of perception, reality, and the metaphysical. On view are two of his renowned “Solar Flare” tondos crafted from mineral crystals, mica, and paint. These works, alongside a selection of luminous watercolors and collages, reflect Alvarez’s ability to merge the spiritual, the scientific, and the cosmic into transformative visual experiences.

Together, the works on view bring together for the first time two pioneering artists whose practices delve into the intersection of material and metaphysical realms. By bridging celestial and terrestrial elements, Cosmic Currents underscores the transformative potential of art as a medium to explore universal truths, blurring the boundaries between science, mysticism, and aesthetic expression.

About the Artists
Since the early 1970s, Lita Albuquerque has created an expansive body of work, ranging from sculpture, poetry, painting and multi-media performance to ambitious site-specific ephemeral projects in remote locations around the globe. Often associated with the Light and Space and Land Art movements, Albuquerque has developed a unique visual and conceptual vocabulary using the earth, color, the body, motion and time to illuminate identity as part of the universal. Recent major exhibitions include Lita Albuquerque: Early Works at Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, Brussels; Groundswell: Women of Land Art at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Lita Albuquerque: Liquid Light presented by bardoLA at 59th La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte 2022; Light & Space at Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark; Desert X AlUla 2020, Saudi Arabia; the 2018 Art Safiental Biennial, Switzerland; Desert X 2017; 20/20: Accelerando at USC Fisher Museum of Art; The Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA and MOCA, among others. A dedicated educator, Albuquerque has held many teaching appointments during her tenure, and was on the core faculty of the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College of Design for 35 years.​

Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.) has performed and exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen in New York, NASA Johnson Space Flight Center, Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles and Palm Beach, Marlborough Gallery in New York, The Moore Space in Miami, Ratio 3 in San Francisco, Jeffrey Deitch in New York, the Yerba Buena Center for The Art in San Francisco, The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Beth Rudin DeWoody’s The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, The Kemper Art Museum in Kansas City, The Drawing Center in New York and the San Antonio Museum of Art in San Antonio, Texas, among others. In 2020, he was included in A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience at the Taubman Museum of Art, he created for the Sarasota Art Museum, an impressive 10.5 × 78 foot vinyl mural, his largest vinyl mural to date, he was included in a group presentation by GAVLAK at The Armory Show as well as creating his largest painting to date, The Life Within You, a 9’ L × 24' W tour de force for The Core Club in NYC.