Welcome to the galleries here at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts.

I'm Andrew Rogers, the executive director here, and I'm excited to give you all a very brief tour of this wonderful retrospective exhibition here in our galleries.

And as we were talking about earlier, our galleries, our learning spaces.

So we have studios upstairs across the street next to us.

So as students come through to engage in their classes, they're learning from the artwork on the walls.

And, I think at first gaze, you can see the absolutely stunning use of color that Jose Maria engages with throughout all of his work in sculpture, in drawing and in photography.

And this piece in particular, we can look at very briefly, because you can see here, this was really one of the last periods that he was engaging with the figure around 2015 to 2017.

And you can begin to see the figures themselves are actually breaking apart.

And this is a beautiful pastel again using pastel.

But the intensity of color is absolutely phenomenal.

His satirical sculptures are always kind of wonderful.

Again, color being worked into it.

He's always had sort of an interest and a vision in city planning as well.

So a lot of his sculptures and structures are these kind of surreal, imagined forms that could potentially exist in the world, but at the same time, cannot the magic realism of that?

Here again, you can see another great example of the sort of synthetic breaking apart of the figure, which is a through line throughout the retrospective, very famous for his forms, of figures of kind of social, socially famous figures and satirically angled perspectives on them.

But here you see the figure actually being dissolved almost entirely.

Here we have this is sort of one of his interesting pieces where it's almost a response to Katrina, not surprisingly, where you see there the word FEMA, and then how it kind of evolves into sort of some more different words and different interpretations.

We have examples of his beast series which were inspired by.

He had a friend actually in the Caribbean that would be deep sea fishing, and he would pull up these absolutely outrageous things.

So he brought in these different kind of anthropomorphic forms of human beings into the fish as his vision of what these kind of animals of the deep would be.

And this beast, quite stunning, as you can see with the intensity of color, are again, these strange, abstracted forms which we can't quite tell what they are, but that through line of realism, even in his abstract form, still coming through clearly and on this wall, the exciting new series of Morandi Revisited, which were which was Jose Maria Dean looking at the work of Giorgio Morandi, a pretty incredible still life painter, Italian painter, and kind of re-envisioning Miranda's work through the lens of his intense color, and form.

And these are the first exhibition exhibited series of photographs of this of of this body of his work.

And then as we move around through here, we begin to see more of a evolution again of the plastic kind of reality of abstraction.

We're here now closer to the contemporary times.

Here we are in.

This piece was finished in 2025.

The figure is now almost completely dissolved into space and color and form.

And then as we go through here, some more of his satirical pieces, the kissable surface in particular is quite wonderful.

Great.

So and as we continue the tour of our galleries, here is a great example of some of those American Dean's exploration into surrealism, something that would not be, you know, unusual to see in Magritte painting, where we have an egg making its way, actually through the very confines of a cage itself.

More examples of his abstracted forms, now almost fully synthesized in the plastic reality.

Again, the satire of this piece in particular I love, which is marbled marble called redundancy, effectively a piece of marble.

He is painted in Trompe Lloyd to look like marble.

So playing with sort of that reality of what?

What is what is not, moving through here again, we can see the beautiful use of color, light form.

These are both these pieces from early to mid 2000.

Rorschach test, which is sort of ironic in that it's, you know, people look at abstraction and they often see Rose.

So again, he's playing with the satire, what the viewer sees, what he is creating.

And then, of course, the return of Juan Carlos, the first of Spain.

I'm really one of his, I would argue, kind of masterworks, which he just recently finished doing the finishing touches on.

I watched him in his studio really bring that sort of magenta towards us, but as you can see, absolutely glowing in a major piece.

More beautiful kind of abstractions here than we have some more of his interesting and a satirical sculptures, more early 2000 kind of refined abstraction, which I wanted to include this.

As you can see, the edges of his forms are not as broken as you'll see in some of his other pieces.

And they're flatter, right?

We're not he's not as concerned in this work with kind of treating his forms as nature, but more just as a fat, a flat space.

And then this is another great example of his satire, the failed prototype, which at first endure, sees as an early plane, but then realizes that he has, you know, painstakingly spent the time to paint it as marbles.

Of course, a plane that marble would not be able to fly.

But really, of the whole exhibition, I would say this is what I am most proud of as far as the juxtaposition of work, because what it shows is the breadth of both his talent, his intent, and his conceptual exploration.

As an artist.

We're on the left.

We see what is a great example, probably one of the best of his figurative pieces, which is very well well known for in the city and in the region.

And on the right we see the kind of evolution of that development towards the plastic realm of abstraction.

And if you look at the works themselves, you can even see compositional elements which relate, particularly if we look at the head piece of the woman and we look at kind of the movement and expression and the abstract forms, I think it's quite a nice pairing of works.

And then finally the the knight table of her animus Bosch, both beautiful and sort of disturbing in equal measure, but a great example of Jose Maria's attention to detail in nature, even in his abstract space.

And as we continue looking at Jose Maria Dean's exhibition here, I thought it important to look at the municipal chapel project, because this is actually a work that one day the vision is to be a reality here in the city of New Orleans.

And much like the Rothko Chapel in Houston, this would be a non-denominational space for people to come and center themselves.

And I don't know if you can see with the camera, but there's a beautiful tableau within it, which is kind of to scale, obviously, with the market, but in real life would be absolutely architectural in nature.

The obelisk series or the obelisk presences, as he calls them, are a fascinating series in their own right.

We actually have two examples of them at an architectural scale out front that he has had fabricated.

But each of these are a vision of what could be in a municipal space, right in a city.

And his idea of the obelisk, and there are many different interpretations of what obelisks are and why they are.

I mean, they go back all day right past ancient Egypt, but he sees them merely as these hands reaching towards God, towards, the muse, the ultimate muse of nature.

And not surprisingly, he uses satire in his obelisks as well, like the Phillips head screwdriver, obelisk and the obelisk that is literally floats on the water itself, or an obelisk that can only be seen from certain perspective.

So it's a forced perspective.

Obelisk, aureus, other obelisks that are actually camouflaged, and the rough title is an obelisk disappears.

So he's playing with what these giant often forms in cities such as Paris and all around the world are and can can be.

And here, finally, another great example of his surrealism, where we have these kind of floating eggs in the form of a cloud themselves.