Independent 20th Century

Hollis Taggart is pleased to return to Independent 20th Century, which will take place on September 24-27 at Sotheby's Breuer building in New York. We will be presenting a solo booth of Puerto Rican-born American artist Frank Diaz Escalet (1930-2012), whose extraordinary body of work and critical contributions to post-war American art history has gone largely unrecognized. Escalet was a self-taught painter and master leathercrafter whose work ranged from quotidian scenes of urban commuters and vibrant nights at New York jazz clubs to cowboys in Western landscapes and pared-down geometric compositions. Throughout his life, Escalet honed a unique aesthetic language that merged a flat, stylized sense of space with a folk art sensibility. Our selection features both his inlaid leatherworks as well as his paintings.

Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1930, Escalet moved to New York at four years old and grew up in a working-class family in Greenwich Village. Despite his lack of formal education, Escalet took full advantage of fortuitous opportunities and cultivated a remarkable sense of perseverance and grit. His canvases are deeply personal expressions of his own lived experiences as a Puerto Rican immigrant in New York, as well as a more universalized, abstracted commitment to humanizing and dignifying fellow immigrants and the working class.

For more information on the gallery's booth presentation please contact us at +1 212.628.4000 or info@hollistaggart.com.