Brooklyn-based visual contemporary artist José Parlá is critically acclaimed for his colourful multidisciplinary practice that blurs the lines between art, architecture, identity and environment.

With influences drawing from his Cuban-American heritage, involvement with Hip Hop’s underground art culture and his city surroundings, Parlá has established a style of painting that transforms the language of the street into a hybrid form of abstraction and urban realism. Finding inspiration in city walls tarnished from years of neglect, the artist’s vibrantly elaborate paintings capture the rawness of urban decay, revealing hidden narratives as the layers are unpacked.

Both Friends Around Town and Reason Random Season are prime examples of Parlá uniquely improvisational approach, as he combines painted marks rendered in acrylic and oil, with plaster and collages of found ephemera. Complex in their execution, both striking canvases invite the viewer to dissect their surfaces from an archaeologist’s point of view. The more Parlá’s works are engaged with, the more detail emerges in their layered surfaces, strengthening their narratives as their urban histories are revealed.

Widely celebrated for his permanent installations of large-scale murals, Parla has also exhibited worldwide, presenting solo shows in recent years at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York (2019), the Neuberger Museum of Art (2018), SCAD Museum of Art (2017), Brand New Gallery in Milan, Italy (2017) and at the YoungArts in Miami (2016).