Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
To apply to the Registry, click here. Join our mailing list here to receive our open call announcement and other programming updates. For any further questions about the Registry, please contact us at registry@whitecolumns.org.
STATEMENT OF WORK
Oswald Newman Saenz renders familiar subjects – women, houses, flowers – stripping them down to their most basic curves and contours and infusing them with hallucinatory color, wobbling rhythm, and traces of spirit made flesh. A cousin of legendary artist Fernando Botero, Saenz taps into the South American tradition of magical realism, in which the natural and supernatural are wrapped up in one another like his tangled vines.
Saenz, born in Colombia in 1964, identifies as having an intellectual disability. Since he was a kid doodling on matchboxes, art has offered him happiness and a portal to another world. “Not everybody is an artist,” he says. “I was born with it. It felt natural. Ideas pop into my head. I put them on paper.”
In 2021, Saenz’s mother passed away from complications of the Covid virus. Her death deepened Saenz’s interest in the unseen world – angels, mythical animals, dancing flames. His artistic practice, he says, is his mom’s way of speaking through him. Her presence dwells in every woman he conjures on paper.