An American contemporary artist born in Venezuela, Henry Bermudez emerged from the Caribbean tropics and immigrated to the USA in 2003 due to political upheaval in his country. His artistic life has been an unexpected intermingling of ideas informed by an acute sensitivity to the past, and stenciled as part of apersonal inventory onto places where he has lived and made his artistic working territory.
His earliest influences came from travels within the Amazon and from a teaching assignment in an Afro Caribbean community called Borbures, a small Afro-Caribbean village in Venezuela on the coast, and next to a vast rainforest. He spent 2 years with the villagers, learning about their music, and exploring the overgrown terrain. Providing a lifelong influence to his work, their stories opened his eyes and curiosity to the myths that served this community.
Later, he spent some years in Mexico where legends stoked imagery within an other-worldliness of constructed creature- plant forms. This was where he began to determine his visual identity.
From his Mexican period, he became interested in the influences of Colonialism, religion, and mythology and how these factors had a role in shaping the character of societies.
Embracing a hybrid of myths, symbols and religious lore from pre-Hispanic Judeo-Christian and Afro-Caribbean influences, his compendium of aesthetics reflect his vision of art beyond Western tradition. Through various processes and mediums [paint, glitter, cardboard, fabric, cut paper assemblage, and ink], his work transcends timelines and national boundaries as he combines magical dimensions of symbols with western rationality. This blend of cultural diversities is his autobiographical vision that further defines itself through immersion into societies other that the one he was born into.