Angel Otero Introduces ‘Agua Salada’ in Somerset

Why It Matters

Agua Salada illustrates how relocation and personal loss can fuel innovative, site‑specific art, offering audiences a poignant lens on migration, memory, and cultural identity, while signaling Somerset’s growing relevance as an artistic hub.

Key Takeaways

• Relocating studio to Somerset reshaped Otero’s creative mindset
• “Agua Salada” explores salt water symbolism of healing and loss
• Paintings reference father’s health, family bonds, and Puerto Rican crabs
• Outdoor installation bridges personal migration narrative with ocean as connector
• Work blends photography, sculpture, and memory to evoke emotional portals

Summary

The video documents Angel Otero’s debut of “Agua Salada,” an outdoor installation unveiled in Somerset after he relocated his studio from Puerto Rico. Otero explains that the move altered his mental and emotional approach, allowing the Somerset landscape and community to inform his creative decisions.

He delves into the work’s symbolism, describing salt water as a metaphor for the ocean, healing, and tears that carry both sadness and joy. The piece intertwines personal narratives—his father’s health struggles, his grandfather’s companionship, and the anecdote of escaped land crabs—to illustrate themes of balance, memory, and familial support.

A striking quote captures his intent: “It wasn’t about tears in the sense of crying, but flooding everything with sadness and happiness.” He also references his earlier beach installation at La Bienal Tropical, noting how the ocean serves as a portal connecting past migrations with present identity.

Ultimately, “Agua Salada” fuses painting, sculpture, and photography to create an emotional portal that reflects universal migration experiences while anchoring them in Otero’s Puerto Rican heritage. The work positions Somerset as an emerging artistic hub and invites viewers to contemplate resilience, heritage, and the unifying power of water.

Original Description

Angel Otero makes his UK debut this spring, featuring a deeply personal body of work completed during an artist residency at our Somerset Gallery

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 Brooklyn NY and Puerto Rico temporarily to Somerset, the residency provided Otero with the opportunity to continue his exploration of memory, place and meaning in the context of a new environment.

The exhibition unfolds across the galleries, with outdoor sculpture extending into the inner cloister courtyard. Paintings range from monumental compositions, including Otero’s largest figurative painting to date, that envelop the viewer in a fully immersive sensory experience to intimate encounters with smaller studies and works on paper, rarely presented outside the studio.

Learn more: https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/angel-otero-agua-salada/

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Hauser & Wirth is an international contemporary and modern art gallery with spaces in Zurich, London, Somerset, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, St. Moritz, Monaco, Menorca, Paris and Basel.

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