Christian Curiel | Ritual Migration
David Klein Gallery is pleased to announce Ritual Migration, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Christian Curiel. The artist’s reception will take place on Friday, June 5th, from 5-8 PM. A conversation with Christian Curiel, moderated by Wayne Northcross, will be held on Saturday, June 6th at 3:00 PM.
Through painting, I hope to honor rituals carried across generations and oceans. Rituals that connect people to land, water, ancestry, and community. - Christian Curiel, 2026
Ritual Migration brings together a new series of paintings by Christian Curiel that explores ideas of the sea as threshold, a site of human passage and displacement. The intensely hued and luminous works of varying scale, made with oil, acrylic and mixed media on panel over the last two years, grow out of images of the Cuban raft migration from the late 1980s and early 1990s. This imagery continues to resonate within the shifting political and geographic conditions of the Atlantic crescent, in Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela. This interest in transitional states extends from earlier series, where Curiel explored other thresholds or “in-between” states such as home to diaspora, childhood to adulthood, remembrance to forgetting, innocence to experience, or exile to belonging. Continuing within this framework in Ritual Migration, the Atlantic crescent becomes a repository of memory and history, a site of historical crossing shaped by colonial histories and migration routes, what scholar Jonathan Howard describes as “the Deep”, the sea understood not simply as metaphor, but as an ongoing lived condition through which histories persist, accumulate, and remain.
Ritual Migration reflects on personal and history, myth, ritual, and lived experience, honoring those who cross physical and spiritual seas in search of refuge, identity, and new beginnings. Christian Curiel 2026
Even the painting process mirrors this structure, employing techniques of a painterly “in-between” through which dreamlike images develop gradually across layered surfaces. Working primarily in oil on linen, Curiel allows the surface to remain visible, letting it function as atmosphere, skin tone, or mid-tone within the composition. An image is built around the natural color of the linen, so that figures seem to surface from within it. Curiel experiments with water poured into acrylic layers that are laid flat on the ground. Where the water accumulates, the paint cannot dry. When the water is later wiped away, it leaves organic marks that resemble droplets or erosion patterns.
In the larger triptychs Ritual Migration and Crash Boat, figures appear in and around the sea and seashore, in inner tubes, makeshift vessels, and improvised crafts, portraying a loose, unresolved narrative in which the sea becomes a metaphor for passage and a psychological and historical space shaped by urgency, danger, endurance, and survival. Within these scenes subtle details begin to surface-plastic debris, fragments of discarded objects or belongings, pointing to environmental, psychological, and ritual undercurrents; offerings of food, suggesting moments of preparation or ritual; and playing cards divining some unknown, alternative, future. – Wayne Northcross, 2026
About Christian Curiel
Inspired by magic realism and the current human condition Christian Curiel’s work mixes the real and unreal aspects of dream states as reflections on Latin American cultural and literary references with elements of ritual, mystery, and symbolism. His work presents a composite of themes related to migration, immigration, belonging, and identity placed within the complex, highly emotionally coded world of youth. Evoking a dreamlike state representing the confusion and fragility of coming of age, the paintings embody the struggle for identity and a sense of belonging.
Curiel’s works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and institutions in the U.S. and abroad including Fondation Cartier, Paris, France; The Bass Museum, Miami FL; MOCA Miami, FL; the Pérez Museum, Miami, FL; The Americas Society, New York, NY; El Museo Del Barrio, New York, NY and NXTHVN, New Haven CT. Major Collections include Fondation Cartier, Paris, France; The Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Fl; The Dean Valentine Collection, L.A. California; The Hort Family Collection, New York, NY and Jean- Pierre Lehmann Collection and the Jeanna Bullock Collection, Russia.
Christian Curiel was born in Puerto Rico to Cuban parents. The family moved to Miami where Christian was raised before heading off to Yale University in the early 2000’s. His passion for education has earned him professor roles at Yale, Southern Connecticut State University, University of New Haven, and Broward College among others. In addition to his solo studio practice, Curiel is a member of the 4-artist collective called Fe Cu Op, who have produced works together for over a decade. He lives and works in New Haven, CT.
About Wayne Northcross
Wayne Northcross is a curator, writer, and cultural strategist with over two decades of experience across contemporary art, media, and institutional programming. He is co-organizer of the forthcoming Detroit Queer Biennial 2027 and serves on the board of Mighty Real Queer Detroit. He has held roles with leading New York galleries and institutions including CANADA, Salon 94, Lehmann Maupin, Nicole Klagsbrun, The Project, Paul Pfeiffer Studio, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and has organized exhibitions for venues such as CANADA, Mighty Real Queer Detroit, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Fusebox Festival, and BronxArtSpace. Northcross attended Wayne State University, where he received a BA in Italian Language and Literature; he also holds a Juris Doctor from University of Miami School of Law.
