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Spanish artist Angel Orensanz is probably best known as the fellow who purchased an extraordinary, formarly abandoned synagogue on Norfolk Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1980's and, along with his brother Al, transformed it into a neighborhood architectural monument and all-purpose arts and community center.
A respected artist for more than 40 years, Angel Orensanz has produced a body of work ranging from large abstract sculptures with humanist overtones, various sets of drawings to a series of conceptual installations and performances that whimsically address social and geopolitical conflict. The latter works invoke his own brand of pacifisman idiosyncratic vision of a multicultural, interdependent world community.
Orensanz is out to metaphorically link his personal and ancestral wanderings to the great international venues of human civilization. In these videos and photographs, Orensanz offers himself as a kind of shambling figure, a delightful modern Sisyphus relentlessly pushing a scarred and sagging globe through the miseries and triumphs of human history.
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