Artist Statement/ Biography

Basically a painter, Carl E. Hazlewood seeks to refresh abstraction. He creates permanent mixed-media work, as well as extemporaneous structures on/off walls and floors using materials sourced from the everyday. Somewhat ephemeral, this offers a multidimensional edge to what’s possible for his composite objects. Oversized work relates to his own body: reach, height, arm-span, etc. Though including a range of formal, sometimes minimal structures, it occasionally surprises with its suggestiveness; something about the folding, pleating, cutting, can recall intimate experience of “skin”… like the crease and wrinkle of forms as they bend into intimate corners of the human body. As live sensual human beings, Eros, the positive principle of creation is always in play—at least metaphorically.

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Brooklyn based Carl E. Hazlewood, born in Guyana, received a BFA (with honors) from Pratt, and an MA from Hunter College. Also a curator and writer, he co-founded Aljira a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ. Recent honors include Fellowships and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. A 2017 ‘Tree of Life Foundation’ award grantee, his fifty-two feet painting installation, ‘TRAVELER’, was commissioned for the Knockdown Center, Maspeth, Queens, in 2017. Hazlewood’s work has been seen in the PRIZM, Volta, and Scope Art Fairs. BOMB Magazine and the NY Times are among publications that have written about the artist.