Hulda Guzmán's Jungle Paintings Debut at Turner
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- Hulda Guzmán's first European institutional show, "Please Awake – Asked Nature Kindly," runs at Turner Contemporary, Margate, from 23 May to 13 September, featuring ultra-colourful jungle landscape paintings conceived from her remote mountaintop studio in the Dominican Republic.
- The exhibition splits between an interior room of Guzmán's personal mythological world — demons from Japanese ukiyo-e prints, floating orbs, a bathing mermaid — and landscape-dominated canvases where nature overwhelms the smaller human figures living within it.
- Guzmán's painterly vocabulary absorbs Henri Rousseau, Seurat, Peter Doig, Dorothea Tanning, Hurvin Anderson, Dexter Dalwood, Gauguin, Kahlo, and Hockney, with Jungian psychoanalysis threading through the symbolism.
- Architect Eddie Guzmán, Hulda's father, designed her modernist wooden studio deep in the Dominican rainforest, high on a mountain with views of jungle and distant ocean — the vantage point that feeds her psychedelic Caribbean landscapes.
- The ecological argument runs beneath the lushness: faced with deforestation, rising sea levels, and ecological collapse, the show frames its title as nature's call for viewers to be present in its beauty while it still exists.
- Self-portraits across the canvases show Guzmán embedded in the landscape — speeding past on a motorbike transporting a palm tree, or watering plants surrounded by family and demons that have been accepted rather than feared.
Why it matters: Guzmán's Turner Contemporary debut gives a Dominican artist her first major European institutional platform, introducing Caribbean landscape painting to a major UK venue. The work operates simultaneously as lush aesthetic spectacle and a stated call to action on deforestation and rising sea levels, making the show both a market-arrival moment for the artist and an environmental statement embedded in the exhibition title itself.
