Over the past decade, Miami-born and based, first-generation Cuban American artists Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares have cultivated an expansive and experimental collaborative practice. Working across video, performance, sculpture, sound, and light, their work gives physical form to the mechanics of power, exposing the absurdities embedded within hegemonic systems.
At Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Wright and Millares present Exile, a two-part exhibition unfolding within the gallery’s Survey Space. Developed over several years, the exhibition reflects on the immigrant experience through themes of displacement, resistance, and survival. Installed across two interconnected spaces, Exile constructs a layered narrative that moves from monument to trace.
In the first space, viewers encounter the work that gives the exhibition its title: Exile, a large-scale installation centered on a refugee boat salvaged from the coast of Miami after washing ashore in Key Biscayne, Florida. Used by Cubans fleeing the island, the vessel becomes both artifact and witness. Through sound and light, Wright and Millares transform the boat into a defiant monument, honoring not only the Cuban diaspora but refugees worldwide.
The second space deepens the exhibition’s inquiry through gesture, and the ambiguity of numerical systems. Also immersed in blue, the adjacent gallery presents a selection of Wright’s cyanotypes and Millares’ paintings alongside Desembarco, a collaborative standalone sculpture that embodies both exile and arrival. Found inside the refugee vessel was a makeshift paddle, a humble tool used to navigate uncertain waters. Wright and Millares embed this paddle into native South Florida oolite limestone, creating a grounded yet suspended object: a quiet monument to crossing, landfall, and survival.
Surrounding Desembarco, Wright’s cyanotypes bear the marks of physical intervention. Using a hammer, the artist performs acts of smashing and impact upon glass laid over chemically treated paper to create photograms or non-negative exposures using the sun. Millares’ ongoing series Paint by Number (begun in 2011) transforms numerical data drawn from real financial documents into layered silkscreens on paper, canvas, vellum, and acetate. Stripped from their original economic contexts, the numbers are repeated, stacked, and obscured within dense chromatic fields.
Together, the two spaces of Exile move between the monumental and the intimate, the sonic and the silent, the physical and the abstract. The exhibition interweaves personal history with collective memory, situating the story of a single boat within a broader framework of global migration, systemic violence, and resistance. Through immersion, material gesture, and the disruption of numerical logic, Wright and Millares draw viewers into close proximity with Exile as lived and embodied experience shaped by displacement, rupture, and the enduring act of survival.
Piero Atchugarry Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by American artist Emil Lukas (b. 1964, Pittsburgh, USA), in his upcoming solo exhibition In Orbit with Untraceable Balance, curated by René Morales. Lukas is best known for “paintings” that consist of rectangular or circular wall-bound objects crisscrossed with miles of Gütermann thread, each strand wrapped around nails driven into the paintings’ supports along the edges.
Lukas refers to the surface at the back of each of these objects as a “reflector,” a pseudo-mirror that causes ambient light rays to bounce back aggressively through the mesh of thread into space, where it meets the viewer’s eyes. With time and focus, where the density of the mesh thins out around the center of each composition, a sphere-like form emerges, hovering in front or behind the object like an intangible, ethereal presence. Whereas most painters are concerned with light and lighting insofar as they can be used to enhance the painting’s surface, or at least prevent distraction from what is rendered on this surface, for Lukas, light itself plays the starring role.
Emil Lukas (b. 1964, Pittsburgh, USA), is an American artist whose work redefines painting through material experimentation and optical sensitivity. Guided by process and intuition, he uses unconventional materials to explore perception and abstraction, creating works that invite both visual and contemplative engagement. Lukas has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, with solo shows at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Mattress Factory, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His work is held in major collections, including the Panza Collection, the Margulies Collection, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and SFMOMA.
Piero Atchugarry gallery presents a contemporary art program and modern art survey. The gallery opened to the public in September 2013 with a Post-War Italian art exhibition. By January 2014 the gallery moved to a large stable adapted as an exhibition space in Garzón. In this space the program allowed outdoor and indoor proposal exploration, through the creation of dialogue between architectural features and curatorial practices.
On December 2018, the program expanded to North America with a second location, a 9000 square feet warehouse on 5520 NE 4th Avenue in the Design District neighborhood. The participation of the gallery in what is a boiling art community that connects Europe, Latin America and both coasts of the United States represents the commitment of the program to support and present the work of local and international artists with an institutional approach.
