
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 NY and Puerto Rico temporarily to Somerset, the residency offers a unique opportunity to observe Otero’s ongoing 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, colour, 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.
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.


Angel Otero is a Puerto Rican-born painter known for redefining what contemporary art can be through a radical ‘oil skin’ technique. Otero’s innovative process transforms oil paint into sculptural collage that bridges personal history, memory, art history, and the tactile atmosphere of Caribbean life.




Hauser & Wirth was founded in 1992 in Zurich by Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser, who were joined in 2000 by Partner and Vice President Marc Payot. A family business with a global outlook, Hauser & Wirth has expanded over the past 26 years to include outposts in Hong Kong, London, New York, Los Angeles, Somerset and Gstaad. The gallery represents over 70 artists and estates who have been instrumental in shaping its identity over the past quarter century, and who are the inspiration for Hauser & Wirth’s diverse range of activities that engage with art, education, conservation and sustainability.

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