Nostalgic memory of my Life Before Birth
Barbara Davis Gallery
March 6\u2013April 18, 2026
Houston, TX <\/p>\n
It is the project of a lifetime.\u00a0When he was young, Spanish photographer Miguel Soler-Roig would often visit his grandfather, the noted physician Dr. Jos\u00e9 Soler-Roig (1902\u201399), who was full of\u00a0stories about the celebrated people he knew. He had been Pablo Picasso\u2019s personal physician, as well as physician to Joan Mir\u00f3 and Salvador Dal\u00ed.\u00a0In his social circles he counted many in the arts and letters.\u00a0His grandson resolved to honor his legacy through his own art practice.<\/p>\n
On view at the Barbara Davis Gallery, Soler-Roig showed the first part of a series he has been working on for the last twenty years. It\u2019s not only any homage to his grandfather, but to an earlier\u2014perhaps more gracious\u2014era. The work is comprised of a series of black-and-white photographic portraits of contemporary sitters, wearing the dress and striking the pose of famous people from the twentieth century.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There\u2019s one of\u00a0\u201cTamara de Lempicka\u201d re-enacting her painting of herself behind the wheel of a sports car,\u00a0My Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) from\u00a01929. She looks quite pleased, if a little bored. In another, we see \u201cFran\u00e7oise Gilot\u201d\u00a0and \u201cPicasso\u201d as he walks behind her, while holding a parasol to shade her on the beach.\u00a0 In\u00a0Truman Capote (2026), the famous author of Breakfast at Tiffany\u2019s sits dapper in a tipped fedora. There is even a selfie of Soler-Roig on his way to a costume party in Venice, eyes wide open and wearing an upturned moustache. Even though the photographer claims it was spur of the moment, he managed to look very much like the man he was dressed up as: Salvador Dal\u00ed.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the entry area of the Davis Gallery, there was a chart Soler-Roig created to map out how the different \u201ccharacters,\u201d as he calls them, were connected to his grandfather, whose name is at the center. There are some 250 names here, and he plans to capture them all!<\/p>\n
Soler-Roig, who lives in Madrid, has worked on many different projects since completing his master\u2019s degree in photography sixteen years ago. Much of his work is conceptual, although, like his grandfather, he takes photographs when he travels and has a series, for example, on the Marfa Lights. He started thinking about this current project about the time he finished his studies.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nostalgic memory of my Life Before Birth Barbara Davis Gallery March 6\u2013April 18, 2026 Houston, TX It is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253281,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-253280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}