Born in Miami in 1973, José Parlá’s painting practice is shaped by the textures, rhythms and palimpsests of urban environments and informed by his upbringing in South Miami, his life in New York and his Cuban heritage. Emerging from Miami’s underground art scene in the early 1980s, Parlá was influenced by the formative years of hip-hop culture, grounding his work in improvisation, movement, mark-making and the layered surfaces of city walls. Working with materials that include oil and acrylic paint, cement and found ephemera, Parlá builds dense, materially complex compositions – layers, shifting opacities and sedimented colour evoke surfaces weathered by use and exposure, reflecting the way cities absorb and retain experience. His distinctive gestural line draws on calligraphy and street writing while engaging with the legacies of Abstract Expressionism. Parlá’s paintings are meditations on memory, interconnectedness, and the unconscious but enduring marks we leave upon the world.

Parlá’s work underwent a transformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. This shift emerged with the Phosphene series (2023), named after the optical phenomenon that creates the sensation of seeing light with eyes closed. Following a near-death experience with Covid, Parlá was drawn to phosphene as a metaphor for interior vision and unconscious memory. These concerns continued in the Ciclos series (2023), in which he turned to the intricate structures of mycelium and the mysterious spread of Candida auris, both of which occupied his thoughts during recovery. The imagery of fungal networks and biological interconnectedness extends the artist’s ongoing exploration of memory, decay and regeneration. Drawing on ideas from Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and its concept of the ‘wood wide web’, Parlá imagines cities as similarly entangled systems: alive, communicative and in constant flux. In this context, his mycelium-like forms function as symbols of survival, relation and unseen connection.

Parlá studied at Miami Dade Community College, Miami; New World School of the Arts, Miami; and the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia. His permanent public commissions include projects for the New York City Department of Design and Construction at the Queens Public Library; the University of Texas at Austin; One World Trade Center, where his monumental mural ONE: Union of the Senses remains the largest of its kind in New York City; Barclays Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; North Carolina State University’s Hunt Library, Raleigh; and Concord CityPlace, Toronto. Institutional solo exhibitions have been presented by the Gordon Parks Foundation, New York (2024); Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami (2024); the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2022); Gana Art Center, Seoul (2022); Istanbul’74, Istanbul (2019); the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Foundation (2019); the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York (2018); the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2017); the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York (2017); the Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas (2016); and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2015), among others. Parlá’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM); the British Museum, London; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; the POLA Museum of Art, Hakone; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York; El Espacio, Miami; and the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana.