Yuyo

Julián Kreimer, Phigment #26, 2026, Pigmented abaca, linen, and cotton pulp paper, 21 x 29 inches

Sarah Lawrence College’s Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Julián Kreimer, Yuyo.

April 2 – May 8, 2026 | Opening reception April 2, 5-8 p.m.

Spanning more than a decade of artistic practice, this exhibition tracks Kreimer’s shift from plein-air observational painting to his current work inspired by his family’s archives. Seeking to understand the context of his own life, Kreimer plumbs this material, producing drawings and paper pulp paintings which consider, in the words of the artist, “issues of Latin American and Cold War history, the story of US immigration, and the legacy of international development.” Kreimer's lifelong family nickname, Yuyo, regional Spanish for "a weed", nods to this search.

Coming from a background in plein-air oil painting, observation is an integral aspect of Kreimer’s artwork. Paintings like Construction #1 seek to ‘capture the unseeable’, a process which requires intense concentration which the artist can get lost within. Kreimer’s landscape paintings teem with life as colors dance and merge with one another, bringing a sense of optimism to the world around us. Kreimer’s emphasis on the use of negative space underlines often-overlooked details to the forefront of our mind, taking viewers past the obvious subject and into what lies in the in-between. Negative space, for Kreimer, is “where the energy of interaction happens… It’s the fluid we’re all floating through.”

In Kreimer’s more recent works, there is a continued concentration on negative space expanding throughout these images, like the residue of memory passed between generations. Delving into the history of the Americas, family, and self, the artist has created a body of work which finds intersections between his own psychic landscape and the expanded socio-political context. Kreimer’s parents left Argentina during the turbulent 1970s, and decided to remain in the U.S. after the coup that installed a US-backed military dictatorship in 1976, the year of Kreimer’s birth. After immigrating to the United States, they worked in human rights law and natural disaster planning at the Organization of American States and the World Bank. These artworks, taking form in drawings, paper pulp paintings and an animation, are the afterimages of Kreimer’s interaction with the photo slides, stationery materials, and the design and architectural motifs which mark his parents’ lives.

The persistent themes of attentiveness and hope are a generational entreaty. Like the substantive development projects his parents worked on, much of this archival project is rooted in Kreimer’s desire to preserve threatened “technical knowledge in the service of improving the world.” He continues: “I grew up surrounded by Latin Americans living in the US working for international organizations, putting into practice a progressive vision of development.” This work is an important celebration and protection of this legacy. Much of the exhibition also explores loss, the necessary antonym of optimism. La (in)herencia de la ultima calgrafía del Buenos Aires (The de-legacy of the last calligraphy of the Buenos Aires National High School) (2024), drawn in pen on his father’s old letterhead, creates a dialogue between the memories of the artist and his father, meditating on experiences and traditions lost to time.

– Gittel Romanik, '26

Julián Kreimer is the chair of the MFA Program at Purchase College SUNY.  Solo shows have been at the Atkinson Gallery at SBCC (CA), TSA LA (CA), Lux Art Institute (CA), and Weeknights Gallery (Brooklyn). His work has also been exhibited at 1969 Gallery, the 2021 Armory show, Super Dutchess Gallery, Kunst in Fluc (Vienna) and Morgan Lehman Gallery. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Hyperallergic, Artcritical, and Two Coats of Paint. He is a repeat fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell and received a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Painting Fellowship. He has been a frequent contributor to Art in America, and has written for Paper Monument, Hyperallergic, and Modern Painters , as well as numerous museum catalogs.