Angel Otero
2 May – 18 October 2026
Somerset
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.
Photo: Javier Romero
In Residence: Angel Otero
Angel Otero will be completing an artist residency at Hauser & Wirth Somerset from 16 March – 20 April 2026, ahead of his UK exhibition from 2 May – 18 October 2026. The exhibition will feature a deeply personal body of work, completed during the residency.
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About the Artist
Angel Otero
Angel Otero was born in 1981 in Santurce, Puerto Rico, where he resided until moving to Chicago in 2004. He currently splits his time between New York and Puerto Rico. Otero was the subject of major solo exhibitions in 2017 at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY, and in 2016 at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. In 2009, Otero was included in the exhibition ‘Constellations’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, shortly after receiving his MFA. Otero’s work is in numerous public and private collections including The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx NY; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago IL; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City MO; Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago IL; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh NC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; Speed Art Museum, Louisville KY; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond VA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY.
Otero’s practice is known for employing highly innovative techniques that challenge the parameters of his materials, revealing the intrinsic qualities of paint. His works are rooted in abstract image making and engage with ideas of memory through addressing art history, as well as his own lived experience. Otero is best known for the Oil Skin works he began in 2010, an ongoing series that demonstrates the inherently transformative nature of the artist’s practice as well as his dedication to expanding the visual field of abstract expressionism. Using oil paint layered onto glass and peeled off at a partially dried state, Otero recomposes his ‘skins’ onto canvas to make entirely new images and patterns.
In 2017, Otero debuted a series of large-scale sculptural oil paintings that resemble tapestry. Hanging freely, these works incorporate salvaged materials from his studio, off-cuts of previous paintings, and found objects that are significant to his native Puerto Rico. The many fragments that make up his compositions become powerful meditations on past and present.
The artist’s early childhood memories are brought to the forefront in his most recent series of paintings which see a return to figuration combined with his hallmark style of abstraction. Otero paints and collages dreamlike scenes upon his vibrant structured canvases, depicting objects and spaces that are loosely based on personal memories associated with the domestic sphere. Probing the boundaries of figuration and abstraction, Otero’s most recent works continue to expand the possibilities of painting and materiality.
Current Exhibitions
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