‘Act First and Then Think’: Artist Angel Otero on How to Turn Failure Into Fuel for Creativity

We visited the artist at his Brooklyn studio on the occasion of his new show at Lehmann Maupin.
Early in his career, some critics lumped Angel Otero in with the “zombie formalists” who were running rampant at the time with their decorative abstract aesthetic, often made by atypical means. Otero, too, makes abstract paintings in a process-based practice that involves layering, scrapping, and scrunching oil paint across canvases. But anyone who visits his newest exhibition, “Milagros,” on view through April 20 at Lehmann Maupin, will see how he’s distinguished himself from that group by pushing his process to new ends—and establishing a new emotional resonance along the way.