The artist
About
Biography
Felipe Lopez is a multidimensional visual artist. He was born in the Bronx, New York, and built his career in Houston, Texas. His career began with mixed-media drawings and paintings.
In 2013 his work was included in the *Exposure* photography exhibition in Long Island City, New York, and in the African American Artist Exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His first solo exhibition, *Constructing the Praxis of Interactivity*, followed at the Houston Arts Alliance Gallery. In December 2014 he exhibited at Art Miami, and in 2015 he showed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Houston Fine Art Fair and the Texas Contemporary Art Fair.
Combining the trade of welding with his visual practice, Lopez developed his *Hook* series across sculpture, mixed media and painting. His work was presented by Cindy Lisica at Revision Space in Pittsburgh. In 2016 he was selected as an Artist INC facilitator through Fresh Arts.
His *Lightbulb* series debuted to strong response in *Natural Flexibility* at Cindy Lisica Gallery in spring 2017, followed by *Fine Wind, Clear Morning* for PrintHouston 2017 and the Aspen Art Fair. At the end of 2017 he pushed the concept further with two new series: *Ambiente*, mixed-media work inside the bulbs, and *Ambiente Chandelier*, large sculptural pieces. Both were shown at Scope Miami 2017 through Asterisk Projects. In 2018 he carried the lightbulb concept into painting with *Space Is Only Noise That You Can See*. May 2018 brought his largest solo exhibition to that point, *Ambiente Amore* at Clarke & Associates, and work from it traveled to *Texas Eclectics* with the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece.
In 2019 the City of Houston, on the recommendation of Houston Arts Alliance, awarded Lopez a Support for Artists and Creative Individuals grant to fund his largest bulb work. That year he presented two solo exhibitions: *The Liquidity of a Right* at Forma 110 and *The Want In My Nature* at Deborah Colton Gallery. He also served on the citywide Disaster Recovery committee with Houston Arts Alliance and the City of Houston. As resident artist at AFA for the Ambient Avenues high school composers project, he created original video for student compositions. He closed 2019 with three projects: - a two-silo installation for Sculpture Month Houston featuring his new *Pendant* series and video; - the *Silent Exclamation* video series, which he curated and contributed to, for the inaugural Houston edition of the stARTup Art Fair; - music and visuals, with his wife, for the theatrical debut of *Saving Susannah* at MATCH.
His work is held in private collections including those of Lester Marks and Cheech Marin.
Artist statement
Felipe Lopez's creative elements are water and light. His work treats water as a precious commodity, and its preservation as a main tenet of ecological ethics. Regardless of social status or culture, clean water is what ties humanity together as its basic necessity. His work also looks at the spiritual and ritual dimension of water, as seen in its use in healing and purification rites throughout the millennia.
His favorite icons are assemblages of microcosms encapsulated in resin to emulate water, held within a light bulb shape and suffused with brilliant ambient light. In light bulbs of various sizes, these miniature installations contain floating organisms and elements from the natural world. Fanciful fly-fishing lures present the human element, a metaphor for our involvement with nature in all its forms.
Curiosity is humankind's best trait, as Goethe once said. Pulling strange and fantastical creatures from the depths of the ocean, and experiencing a novel life system firsthand, may have inspired our ancestors to look for other worlds, real and imagined, beyond our planetary confines. Lopez explores how our relationship with the natural world expands beyond those confines.