Los Angeles, Calif. – October 18, 2017. The Denenberg Fine Arts gallery has announced an upcoming retrospective exhibit of the Bolivian-American portrait artist Juan Bastos. The exhibit, Juan Bastos: California Portraits, opens on November 4th with an invitation-only reception and then runs for two weeks, starting on November 5th, as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA – Latin American & Latino Art in LA.
The Juan Bastos exhibit brings together a collection of 35 oil paintings, pastels, and pencil drawings of distinguished Californians and other commissions, painted and drawn by Bastos from 1996 to 2017. Bastos has lived and worked in Los Angeles for 22 years.
“One of the last and very best portrait artists who still works from life.”
Don Bachardy, artist
Portraits of Richard Harrison, Sir Ian McKellen, the children of Jimmy and Vicki Iovine, Rudolph Nureyev, Patricia Morison, Lawrence Platt, Don Bachardy, Dr. Alan Shabo, Valerie Sobel, Susan Sontag, Charlize Theron, Gore Vidal, Maria Vidal, Andrew and Erna Viterbi, and Hutton and Ruth Wilkinson will be amongst the portraits on exhibit. “The opening night is an opportunity for many of my portrait subjects to see their portraits being displayed as a group for the first time,” says Bastos.
“When I was offered the opportunity to gather a collection of painted and drawn portraits by Juan Bastos,” says gallery owner Stuart Denenberg, “I realized that his portraits from life, fuse memory and culture in an honored tradition to give us a rendering of the emotional truth of specific personalities.”
Juan Bastos: California Portraits is part of the Participating Gallery Program of
Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 70 cultural institutions across Southern California. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty.
Juan Bastos is a Bolivian-American who has lived and worked in Los Angeles for 22 years. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1958, Juan and his family returned to Bolivia, their homeland, 11 years later. He came to the United States where he enrolled at Georgetown University in 1979. He later obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a Master of Fine Arts from Towson University.
Hundreds of diverse Bastos portraits–women, men, children, families, as well as pets–hang in private residences, embassies, churches, libraries, universities, government buildings, and corporate offices in California, and throughout the US, South America, and Europe. As early as 1999, the New York Times featured Bastos in a front page Arts & Culture story about the reemergence of traditional portraiture.
Collectors who have commissioned portraits by Bastos include Philip Niarchos, Eugenio Lopez, and Pamela Joyner. Commissioning institutions include the University of Southern California, Good Samaritan Hospital, Ceders-Sinai Medical Center, George Washington University, and Harvard University.
