Caracas Venezuela. B. 1970 - Tony Vazquez-Figueroa received his BFA (Film) from Emerson College, Massachusetts in 1992.
By 1995, he had become an award-winning Advertising-Creative in Venezuela. His Client list had names such as Coca-cola, Chrysler, Jeep, Fiat, Polar, BBVA, Chivas Regal, among others.
At 27 he continued his art studies, first, at the Escuela de Arte San Alejandro in Habana, Cuba and then, earning a scholarship, at the New York Studio School. He then finished his formal training in 2002 at the Slade School of painting - UCL- under the tutelage of Jenny Saville.
His work has been greatly shaped by his experiences in Advertising and his time in Cuba between 1997/99 and Venezuela, between 2002-2010.
He received the Honorable Mention at the Long Beach Island Foundation for the arts and Sciences, Works on Paper 2017, NJ, USA, the 2015 Rozas-Botran Foundation Latin American Award, and The First Price of The 63rd. All Florida Exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in 2014.
His work is featured in public and private collections worldwide, including The Perez Art Museum Miami, The Museum of Latin American Art California, The UNIS Museum Guatemala, Alan Kluger’s Collection and the Maldonado Collection among others. He has also been showcased in numerous solo and group exhibitions and international art fairs Like Zone Maco, Pinta NYC, MIA, Scope NY-MIA, Context MIA, etc.
Vazquez-Figueroa is currently represented by LNS Gallery Miami, Galeria Beatriz Gil Caracas, and lives between Miami and Mexico.
Artist Statement
Vazquez-Figueroa investigates social, economic, and political themes related to ideologies and cultural histories under the influence of the crude oil industry. His work activates space, using materials such as bitumen, crude oil, plastics, rubber, and resin among others. Utilizing photographic and paint mediums, he creates minimalist works of art where he un-does selective imagery through reductive techniques to blackout objects or surfaces, creating dark reflective abstracted planes that are both literal and figurative voids. Through this process, the artist emphasizes dichotomies between disappearance and emptiness; asking the viewer to question concepts related to truth and perception.
In his current body of work, Vazquez-Figueroa is focusing on how crude oil influenced and changed the social and political landscape of Venezuela: the place where he was born. Using crude oil as a key material in the creation of works that include drawings, photography, oil-ink blots, three-dimensional objects and prints made from his specially created oil ink, he has produced a personal archive of the products that form his country’s and his own collective memory and patrimony… an inventory of his own contrived archive, both real and imagined, available and no longer existent, and all dependent on oil and made of oil or its products.
www.tvazquez.net
