2025 PAUL HUGHES FINE ARTS
The Seven Stars Are Always Together
Dialogue exhibition with a selection of works from the Pre-Columbian collection of Paul Hughes Fine Arts, Maiden Bradley, UK
July 5 – October 5, 2025
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Photos by David Watts, courtesy Paul Hughes Fine Arts
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Exhibition text: “Paul Hughes Fine Arts is presenting a compelling exhibition from our Pre-Columbian collection with contemporary works by the Chilean artist Felipe Mujica, showcasing a provocative exploration of contemporary issues through the lens of historical and artistic reference. Each piece in this show articulates a dialogue between past and present within a chronological period spanning 2000 years, revealing arts relentless inquiry and insights into the complexities of social, racial and aesthetic identities.
Felipe’s works invites audiences to engage with a rich tapestry of ideas and emotions, unearthing connections between historical, personal and artistic narratives. This showcase serves as an exploration of the enduring questions that define the human experience and is testament to Felipe’s profound ability to provoke thought and inspire dialogue, ensuring that his work resonates powerfully within the contemporary art landscape when interwoven with his Pre-Columbian heritage.
This poignant juxtaposition of materials and mediums invites contemplation on themes of memory and the passage of time, urging viewers to reflect on the cyclical nature of history and its influential impact on contemporary life.
Western European abstraction has a tendency to view its development as a uniquely Eurocentric phenomena, yet if we view the abstracted geometrics achieved by the ancient Andean’s we find geometric aesthetics from at least 2000 years before as developed by Pre-Columbian artists of the Andes, it is this dialog that
Felipe enters into giving abstract aesthetic a sense of continuity, as Annie Albers in homage dedicated her book ’To my great teachers the weavers of ancient Peru”, thus began the 20th centuries discovery and affinities of Andean textile arts into the visual language of modern pioneers of abstraction that was to project an enduring resonance to this day”.
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The Seven Stars are Always Together by Felipe Mujica.
The way I look for titles for my pieces or exhibitions is a combination of random and guided selection. Most of the time the title appears as a strike of luck: I pick a book of my interest open a page and see what grabs my attention, quickly, without thinking or processing it. Sometimes it’s immediate, other times it takes a few tries. In this case, the title of my exhibition at Paul Hughes Fine Arts in Maiden Bradley comes from a poem called
Tahirassawichi in Washington, by Nicaraguan Poet, artist, political activist, and priest Ernesto Cardenal. The book is titled Golden UFOs, The Indian Poems (Los ovnis de oro, poemas indios), and was published by Indiana University Press in 1992. What interests me about this book is the political dimension of Cardenal’s poetic narrative of Indigenous cultures of the Americas, North, Central, and South. The seven stars could be seven mountains, seven trees, seven lakes, seven waterfalls, seven bisons or pudus… or part of any of the wonderful cosmologies that cross this continent. For 25 years I have not lived in Chile, besides family and friends, what I mostly miss is looking at the Andes Mountains every morning.
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