Happenings provides references on art events, exhibitions, biennales, art fairs and festivals, with a focus on Abstraction in Action artists and post-90s abstraction from Latin America.
Broken Circle
May 18 – August 27, 2014
Curated by Alma Ruiz
CAFAM Museum
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Guatemalan artist Darío Escobar famously repurposes sports equipment to construct compelling sculptures and installations that convey movement and geometry. For his first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles, he will create a site-specific installation composed of approximately 1,000 red bike reflectors that will be attached to the wall in undulating and rotating patterns. The mural-like wall installation resembles a large scale drawing activated by light and the visitor’s own movement through the gallery space.
Spaces of Repression and Liberation is a dual exhibition of historical works by Horacio Zabala and Eduardo Kac. Both artists were working during tumultuous periods, one in Argentina and the other in Brazil, near the end of dictatorial regimes. As societal and political limitations bore down upon civilians, artists sought alternative modes of creative expression as a means to continue developing artistically while, importantly, responding to the harsh realities of their current situation. Through their different series of works, Zabala and Kac explore the effects that authoritarianism, censorship and violence had on the body, identity and individuality.
*Image: Horacio Zabala, Anteproyecto de arquitectura represiva, 1973. Pencil on paper, 12 3/5 x 18 in. (32 x 45.7 cm) each. (Detail)
Uruguayan artist Marco Maggi fills more than 6,000 square feet of exhibition space with miniscule drawing and sculptures that are virtually invisible except for the shadows they cast. Glance around the exhibition and you’ll see little but vast white space. As you slow down and really look, you’ll discover astonishing density, precision, beauty and wisdom. With this warehouse-scaled, site-specific installation of inconspicuous objects, Maggi hopes to change your perspective, forcing you to examine what you think you know, and revealing it inadequate.
Marco Maggi is renowned for virtuoso drawing and innovative applications of common materials uncommonly used in art-making. His tightly-packed, inscriptive encryptions have been compared to microchips, satellite imagery and archaic alphabets. But there’s more to the work than technical skill and formal allure. Maggi continues to use blindness as a metaphor for our inability to digest the mass of information in the information age; our incapacity to see through the half-truths of mass media; our ineptitude at considering the perspective of ‘the other’; our incompetence at focus; and our unwillingness to take the time to learn.
Maggi’s art is awe-inspiring, but he makes you work for it. He compels you to move around until the light catches the glint of graphite or casts a shadow from a delicately carved slice of paper. He forces you to look obliquely at his tiny megalopolises, to gaze into security mirrors, even to crawl around on the floor. Having you physically change your position to decode his artwork is a metaphor for viewing the world from a different perspective – through someone else’s eyes – and, literally, someone else’s eyeglasses, in the case of one of the pieces in this exhibition. It’s only by changing your viewpoint that you gain insight.
The content and context of this exhibition are geopolitics. We read or see second, third or fourth-hand reports of events that don’t make sense, happening in places we’ve never been, between cultures we don’t understand. How can we begin to comprehend our world? Maggi says, “Focus is not the object or the subject, but the time between the object and the viewer. I am interested in the pace of the viewing process.” By slowing the viewer, Maggi hopes to evoke empathy and hence consciousness.
Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Marco Maggi lives in New Paltz, New York. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America since 1998. His work is in major public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Daros Collection, Zurich; Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, New York; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Sao Paulo; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Instante Eterno
Curated by Maria Constanza Cerullo
May 10 – July 11, 2014 MACBA
Buenos Aires, Argentina
MACBA inaugura el calendario 2014 en el mes de mayo con una exhibición antológica del artista argentino Fabián Burgos. Un conjunto de más de 15 piezas del artista realizadas entre los años 2000 y 2014, se reúnen bajo la perspectiva curatorial de María Constanza Cerullo, Curadora en Jefe de la colección MACBA.
Con un juego de sentidos opuestos y en convivencia, en palabras de la curadora, Instante eterno, nos remite a las diversas investigaciones que Fabián Burgos recorre en el terreno pictórico, asociado a las vertientes del neocinetismo y el arte óptico. Siguiendo una larga tradición que se vincula a las corrientes de la abstracción geométrica preocupadas por el efecto de la forma, el color y la vibración de los mismos que percibe la retina, Burgos dialoga de forma libre e impertinente con las figuras canónicas de la tendencia.
A partir del empleo de mecanismos de apropiación y cita, así como los efectos retinianos del fenómeno moiré, Burgos repiensa y homenajea a artistas claves de la historia del arte moderno y contemporáneo. En su texto Constanza Cerullo, a propósito del título El amor probablemente de una muestra que presentó Burgos en la que fuera durante años su galería -Dabbah Torrejón- la curadora menciona:
“Este rotulo tan provocativo pareciera referir a la admiración por los artistas que cita a la vez que un juego irreverente. La producción de Burgos esta signada por una profunda transgresión, al alterar los rasgos mas característicos de cada una de las piezas referidas. Las obras mas representativas de Soto, Riley, Max Bill y Buren fueron apropiadas y reformuladas. Esta transgresión a los artistas por los que el tiene devoción se replica en el titulo, que hace referencia a la película, El diablo probablemente (1977), de Robert Bresson, uno de sus directores favoritos”.
Asimismo se presentarán piezas de las series tituladas Sin fin, espirales y aquellas conocidas como cercos, obras donde además de la anécdota cinéfila, el accidente y la certeza conviven entre sus universos de referencia.
