Angel Otero

2 May-18 Oct 2026

Overview

Angel Otero makes his UK debut this spring, featuring a deeply personal body of work completed during an artist residency at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. Known for his physically immersive approach to paint as material, Otero transforms the medium itself—scraping, layering and peeling dried oil paint to create richly textured compositions that hover between abstraction and figuration. Moving his studio practice from New York and Puerto Rico temporarily to Somerset, the residency provides Otero with the opportunity to continue his exploration of memory, place and meaning in the context of a new environment.
Angel Otero’s signature mode of storytelling evokes the ways in which household objects become personified through the lens of memory. These objects, seemingly quotidian at first glance, take on the role of surrogates for family members and moments from the artist’s past.

Each work becomes an accumulation of intimate fragments, a composite self-assembled from elements that are never singular or fixed. His process remains one of construction and deconstruction: building up surfaces of oil paint on glass, allowing them to partially dry, then carefully peeling the fragile ‘skins’ that he repositions onto canvas. This method embraces unpredictability, welcoming chance into the final composition and allowing for continual shifts and transformations. Each work becomes a palimpsest of gesture, color and duration, carrying its own history on its surface where traces of previous marks bleed through.

The exhibition marks an expansion of Otero’s practice beyond the canvas, translating his fascination with process, materiality and time into sculptural installations and moving image.