‘I’m a grandma boy’: Puerto Rican artist Angel Otero on family, ‘skin’ paintings and his unusual choice of studio
- Now showing in Hong Kong, New York-based Otero opens up on working in a church during the pandemic and why his grandmother is so important to his work
In early 2020, Angel Otero, an artist from Puerto Rico with a studio in Brooklyn, New York, was looking for a space outside the city. He wasn’t escaping Covid, which had yet to shut down the globe, but a bolt-hole from the art world.
He was 39, represented by the Lehmann Maupin gallery, not stratospherically successful yet definitely getting attention, but he wasn’t sure how he felt about himself.
“Honestly, I think previous to the pandemic, there was this sort of Angel that questions everything, wasn’t sure, was very timid to take certain decisions,” he says, on a chilly, wet New York morning in January 2023. Otero has such an engaging cheerfulness, and his work is so vibrant, it’s difficult to picture this lack of buoyancy.
“The lady [property] broker was, like, ‘Hey, I run out of options for you, you don’t like nothing. I’m going to show you the last thing and it’s a church.’ When she said that word, my toes really crumbled because I grew up Catholic, right?”
In fact, it wasn’t a Catholic church, it was (decommissioned) Methodist, built in 1867 in the Hudson Valley.
“Maybe I’m not as deeply religious as maybe I was as a kid, when my grandma would take me to church, but that environment – the echo, the lighting, the sculpture, the high ceiling, just everything – was so, so celestial and magical.”
