Henry Bermudez
Henry Bermudez’s was born in Venezuela and became a naturalized American citizen in 2012. His interest in the visual representations of cultures and mythologies have appeared in his work in varying forms during his career. A journey of geographical, artistic and human observation has taken him from his first teaching position in Borbures, a small isolated Afro Caribbean community in Venezuela to representing his country at the 42nd Venice Biennale in 1986. His artistic work transcends timeline and national boundaries. His work has been included in many exhibition catalogs such as the X International Print and Drawing Exhibition of China as well as in books on the subject of Venezuelan art.
Mr Bermudez arrived in the USA in 2003, and has been commissioned by the Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia on several major projects. He became a recipient for the Franz and Virginia Bader Fund and also received The Libby Newman Artist Residency at The Brandywine Print Workshop in Philadelphia [2017]. Mr. Bermudez received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant [2012]. He was chosen to work with the Philagrafika print collaborative with artistic director/ curator Jose Roca. In 2011, he was invited to install work at The Philadelphia International Airport Art program and in 2016 he was awarded a Peter Benoliel Fellowship from CFEVA in Philadephia. He is the recipient of a Pollock Krasner Grant [2012] and The Franz and Virginia Bader Fund grant [2018]. In 2020 he was invited to present a mini-retrospective showing work from 2006 – 2020 at Taller Puertorriqueño. The exhibition was favorably reviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Henry has exhibited extensively abroad in Venezuela, Germany, Ireland, Rome, Spain and Mexico and his work can be found in esteemed collections such as in those of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY, the Modern Art Museum of Mexico, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and in the Venezuela National Gallery of Caracas, amongst others.
Since arriving in the USA, he has been active as an artist in his community, and has shown locally and nationally. Up until the current Covid 19 pandemic, Mr Bermudez was teaching art at CADI [Career and Academic Development Institute] for disadvantaged youth and at Fleisher Art Memorial. Henry Bermudez is co-director of HouseGallery1816 in Fishtown and maintains an active studio and exhibition schedule.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am an American contemporary artist born in Venezuela in 1951. Emerged from the Caribbean tropics, my artistic life has been an unexpected intermingling of ideas informed by an acute sensitivity to the past, and stenciled as part of a personal inventory onto places where I have lived and made my artistic working territory.
My earliest influences came from my travels within the Amazon and from a teaching assignment in an Afro Caribbean community called Borbures within my birth country, Venezuela. I spent some years in Mexico where mythical dream imagery existed in an otherworldliness of constructed creature- plant forms and determined my visual identity.
I embrace a hybrid of myths, symbols and religious lore from pre-Hispanic, Judeo-Christian and Afro-Caribbean influences. Through various processes and mediums [paint, glitter, cardboard, cut paper assemblage, and ink], I create a compendium of aesthetics that reflect my vision of art beyond Western tradition. It is my hope that my work can transcend timelines and national boundaries as I join magical dimensions of symbols with western rationality. This blend of cultural diversities is my autobiographical vision that further defines itself through immersion into societies other that the one I was born into.
Portfolio
