Angel Otero: a homecoming

Angel Otero builds surfaces and then destroys them. He oil paints onto plexiglass, lets it dry, peels it away in sheets, and collages sections onto canvas—a process that is at once controlled and uncertain. What emerges from that tension is work between abstraction and figuration, between the intimate and the historical, between remembered and reconstructed. The Puerto Rican artist, based between San Juan and New York, has spent his career developing a practice that centres on personal memory in art—crabs escaping across his grandfather’s floor, the texture of a childhood home, the weight of distance—while remaining in dialogue with the history of painting, from Spanish Baroque tradition to Abstract Expressionism. His first solo exhibition in the UK, Agua Salada, presented at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, marks a significant expansion of that practice into sculpture and film, and a homecoming of an entirely different kind.

‘Angel Otero. Agua Salada’ will be on display at Hauser & Wirth Somerset from 2 May to 18 October 2026. 

Hauser & Wirth Publishers will publish a new dedicated title, ‘Angel Otero’ in September 2026. An exclusive pre-release will be available from July 2026 at Hauser & Wirth Somerset.

hube: You’ve lived in New York for many years, but Puerto Rico remains deeply present in your work. How does that distance, both physical and emotional, shape how memory appears in your works?

Angel Otero: Although I’ve lived in New York for many years, I recently moved back to Puerto Rico and established a studio practice there, while keeping my New York space. These days I’m constantly moving between the two. But before that return, the distance was a powerful shaping force. It changed how I confronted the feeling of missing a place and, more specifically, missing the community that defines it. That distance creates space for other elements to enter the conversation—things that I might not have noticed in proximity. For me, memory functions as a tool of exploration, a lens through which I can confront the self. 

h: Memory seems to sit at the centre of your practice, but not as something stable or nostalgic; it’s layered, sometimes incomplete. Do you think of your work as recovering the past, or more as reconstructing it? 

AO: Within the instability of recollection—in its gaps and slippages—that’s where the reconstruction happens. I’m not trying to retrieve something intact. What interests me is the collapse between certain memories, whether they are crystal clear or blurry, and things that are happening to me in the present day. That incompleteness is generative. That’s where the work lives.