Nela Arias-Misson (1915-2015) was a Cuban-born painter whose work extended over fifty years and overlapped significantly with The New York School.  She exhibited internationally and was friendly with many artists of the period, including Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Karel Appel, Walasse Ting, and Antoni Tapies. She studied with Hans Hofmann at his schools in New York City and Provincetown and forged a reciprocally kind attachment to him, thriving under his tutelage. She diligently followed Hoffman's instruction, as evidenced by her countless figure drawings of the 1940s and 50s and her adoption of abstraction as an "arena" for action. Arias-Misson was striving to put a form in space, using the rectangle as a virtual theater while working spontaneously. Hofmann encouraged a deep visual illusion grounded by the figure in space. Arias-Misson became entirely proficient in the language, and understandably her work in the 1940s and 50s followed a modernist orthodoxy. Arias-Misson painted like many of her peers with a flair for immediacy and rawness. However, her physical application of paint set her apart from most of them. In the longer run, and after she left NYC for Spain in 1960, Arias-Misson moved into unchartered waters and developed some most astonishing paintings in her later years. Her vision is so unique and startling that she upends art history as we know it. This exhibit is dedicated to making a case for Arias-Misson: how she evolved artistically and why she has been largely overlooked. As she once predicted: "When the time comes, something will happen." That time has arrived.Arias-Misson lived daringly. Her creative metamorphosis speaks to her individuality and utmost respect for painting. She set a high bar. Formal abstraction was finally taken down by Philip Guston's infamous exhibit at Marlborough Gallery in 1970 and younger artists bolted from their previous postures and religiously adopted this new narrative of painting. Guston was the progenitor of New Image Painting: Jennifer Bartlett, Jonathan Borrofsky, Susan Rothenberg, Louisa Chase, et al. But Arias-Misson was more likely the legitimate predecessor of these artists. Her challenge to Hoffman's conventions was Oedipal in scale; she internalized what she needed and discarded the rest. Her paintings are preconscious and fueled by fantasy, like living dreams. They are allusive and fictionalized, evoking an otherworldliness captured, set apart, and isolated. Arias-Misson took painting to a moral plane by exploring her world and then going beyond what we know. She employs a degree of absurdity as she navigates the here and now. She laughs in the face of fear and dread while conjuring images of extraordinary delight; her view remains saintly and playful. Arias-Misson freed herself from any known rules regarding painting and entered a fantasy world without any skepticism or doubt. She found her images, all of them essential, and created her destiny. Nela Arias Misson passed away in Miami Fl a few weeks short of her 100th birthday. ~George Negroponte, August 2022