Artist: Iván Navarro
Mute Parade
October 26, 2016 – December 23, 2016
Paul Kasmin Gallery
New York, USA.
Upon entering Mute Parade, the viewer is confronted by a towering pyramid of six drums with the words HIGH, TONE, TUNE, BASS, MUTE, and DEAF embedded in LED lights. This monumental work, titled TUNING, 2015, produces a visual representation of sound while simultaneously removing and negating the original function of the instruments; ‘playing a song,’ in the absence of sound. In the center of the adjacent room, two freestanding drums– each six-feet in diameter– incorporate neon, LED, mirrors, and electricity to produce Navarro’s iconic infinite vanishing points. Circular texts, written in light, repeat the words KICKBACKand KNOCKNOCKNOCK in a seemingly boundless loop. The inherent silence and stillness of the artworks creates an uncanny perception of audio and movement, probing the relationship between sight and sound.
A final installation consists of four 6 x 6 foot structures that make up the Impenetrable Room (2016). This new compositional innovation co-opts the materials and format of portable “road cases,” which are customarily used to transport and protect musical instruments. Refitting the cases with mirrors and neon light, Navarro transforms these static objects into deep spaces that appear to reverberate in perpetuity. Silent and monolithic, these self-contained rooms resonate with unspoken narrative power.
Throughout the exhibition, black and white paper squares are scattered across the floors of all three galleries. The words “Read You” and “Loud Unclear,” printed on opposite sides of the cards, call attention to the disjunction between the visual and auditory aspects of communication. Informed by the aesthetics and rhythms of military parades, Mute Parade contemplates the juxtaposed feelings of celebration and intimidation that martial music begets.
December 12, 2016 Ivan Navarro: Storylines https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/ivan-navarro-storylines/
Artists: Paweł Althamer, Julieta Aranda, Matthew Barney, Kevin Beasley, John Bock, Carol Bove, Ernesto Caivano, Mariana Castillo Deball, Maurizio Cattelan, Trisha Donnelly, Shannon Ebner, Simon Fujiwara, Ellie Ga, Gerard & Kelly, Simryn Gill, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rachel Harrison, Camille Henrot, Juliana Huxtable, Rashid Johnson, Matt Keegan, Agnieszka Kurant, Mark Leckey, Lee Bul, Zoe Leonard, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Nate Lowman, Mark Manders, Ryan McGinley, Josephine Meckseper, Zanele Muholi, Iván Navarro, Catherine Opie, Gabriel Orozco, Laura Owens, Katie Paterson, R. H. Quaytman, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Xaviera Simmons, Taryn Simon, Alexandre Singh, Agathe Snow, Ryan Trecartin, Danh Vo, Sharif Waked, Jonas Wood, and Haegue Yang.
Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim
June 5 – September 9, 2015
Guggenheim Museum
NYC, NY, USA
Visual art has always been closely associated with storytelling. In Western culture, painting and sculpture initially evolved to illuminate narratives of religion, patronage, and power. Over the centuries, genre scenes, still lifes, and portraits—often created as intricate allegories for religious or historical subject matter—became popular as the narrative role of art expanded. In the twentieth century, with the advent of abstraction as a radical break with the past, many artists associated with the avant-garde rejected the figurative and, hence, eliminated explicit narrative content. In the United States and Europe, this tendency culminated during the 1960s and 1970s in Minimal painting and sculpture that foregrounded geometric abstraction and in Post-Minimalism’s examination of process and materiality. The 1980s witnessed a resurgence of figurative art, much of which harked back to expressionistic styles of the 1920s and 1930s.
During the 1990s, a generation of younger artists embraced the concept of storytelling to articulate the politics of identity and difference, investing both abstract and representational forms with narrative content. Storylines opens with key examples from that decade, which serve as thematic anchors and highlight the museum’s own exhibition history. Most of the works on view, however, were created after 2005 and offer an expansive view of the new paradigms for storytelling forged during the past ten years to communicate ideas about race, gender, sexuality, history, and politics, among other trenchant themes.
Bringing together over one hundred works from the Guggenheim’s contemporary collection, Storylines examines the diverse ways in which artists today engage narrative through installation, painting, photography, sculpture, video, and performance. For these artists, storytelling does not necessarily require plots, characters, or settings. Rather, narrative potential lies in everyday objects and materials, and their embedded cultural associations. In projects created through extensive research, acts of appropriation, or performance, the artists in Storylines uncover layers of meaning, turning to individual experience as a means of conveying shared stories, whether real or fictional.
The recent narrative turn in contemporary art cannot be separated from the current age of social media with its reverberating cycles of communication, dissemination, and interpretation. Seemingly every aspect of life is now subject to commentary and circulation via digital text and images. These new narrative frames highlight the roles that each of us can play as both author and reader, foregrounding the fact that meaning is contingent in today’s interconnected and multivalent world. As a means of celebrating this dynamic, the museum has invited writers to contribute reflections—in prose or poetry—on selected works in Storylines. Engaging the rich historical relationship between literature and art, the resulting polyphony signals the diverse interpretive potential that lies within each object on display. Visitors may access these texts using the Guggenheim app or in booklets located throughout the museum.
July 21, 2015 Iván Navarro & Ishmael Randall Weeks: New Ways of Seeing https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/ivan-navarro-ishmael-randall-weeks-new-ways-seeing/Artists: Claudia Alvarez, Afruz Amighi, Rina Banerjee, Christian Ruiz Berman, Sanford Biggers, Cui Fei, Leonardo Drew, Rashawn Griffin, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Wenda Gu, Ginny Huo, Tamiko Kawata, Iván Navarro & Courtney Smith, Kambui Olujimi, Cecilia Paredes, Soo Sunny Park, Yinka Shonibare, Nari Ward, and Ishmael Randall Weeks.
New Ways of Seeing: Beyond Culture
May 10 – July 12, 2015
Dorsky Gallery – Curatorial Programs
Long Island City, NY, USA
New Ways of Seeing: Beyond Culture features works by emerging and seasoned artists of African/ African American, Asian/Asian American, Latino/ Hispanic, and Middle Eastern heritages who are changing and expanding the vocabulary and agendas of the art world by injecting ideas from their world cultures and experiences. These proactive artists utilize materials and imagery in innovative ways that address themes including race, gender, ritual, craft, and language. Their materials often challenge existing associations and subvert expectations. They break down barriers to create new mythologies. Their works conflate the local and global, past and present, fact and fiction. These artists are “transcending the limits of individual cultures.”1
The phrase “New Ways of Seeing” acknowledges that many past and present interpretations of culture are flawed, incomplete, or even false. As we know, scholars from ancient to Post-Colonial and Postmodern times had different views and agendas, often excluding women. In another direction, cultures borrow from, adapt, and change each other in myriad ways.
July 8, 2015 Iván Navarro: Jardins https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/ivan-navarro-jardins/Artist: Iván Navarro
Jardins, Opening of new gardens at Baró
April 11 – May 23, 2015
Baró Jardins
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Ao subverter conceitos de design, criando um minimalismo carregado de emoção, o artista chileno coloca em foco reflexões políticas e sociais originárias de sua experiência com o regime ditatorial chileno sob o qual cresceu. Mais do que trazer estas questões à luz do neon, Iván Navarro transporta o espectador a infinitos labirintos, onde o espelhos ecoam o que muitas vezes as vozes podem calar.
Image: Iván Navarro, Strike
April 13, 2015 Iván Navarro: Onomatoepopeyas https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/ivan-navarro-onomatoepopeyas/Artists: James Nares, Jenifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Felipe Águila.
Onomatoepopeyas, La re-significación del espacio a través del sonido
Curated by Iván Navarro
March 21 – April 21, 2015
Centro Cultural Matucana 100
Santiago, Chile
ONOMATOEPOPEYAS es la combinación de las palabras “onomatopeya” y “epopeya” para explorar cómo el sonido está representado en las narrativas “épicas” que estos trabajos contienen.
-“Street” de James Nares (video)
Esta es la pieza central de la exhibición. En septiembre de 2011, Nares- quien vive en New York desde 1974- grabó por 16 horas la gente de las calles de Manhattan desde un auto en movimiento usando una cámara de alta definición que generalmente se usa para grabar cosas que se mueven a alta velocidad (una bala o un colibrí). Luego Nares ralentizó este material y lo dejó en una hora de movimiento continuo y fijo, que musicalizó con una melodía de una guitarra de 12 cuerdas compuesta e interpretada por su amigo Thurston Moore, co-fundador de la banda Sonic Youth.
-“Returnin g a Sound”de Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla (video)
Este video fue hecho en Vieques, Puerto Rico, una isla usada durante 60 años por la milicia norteamericana y las fuerzas de la OTAN para ejercicios de bombardeo. Aquí se prepararon intervenciones militares como la de Vietnam, Corea, Bahía Cochinos, Los Balcanes, Somalía, Haití, Golfo Pérsico, Afganistán e Irak.
El movimiento nacional rebelde junto a una red internacional de apoyo, logró que se detuviera el bombardeo en mayo de 2002, además del retiro de las fuerzas militares norteamericanas de la isla, y el comienzo del proceso de desmilitarización y futuro desarrollo de la zona.
“Returning a sound” da cuenta de esta campaña de paz y justicia, y al mismo tiempo señala los posibles riesgos. El video se dirige no solo al paisaje geográfico sino al paisaje sonoro, que para los habitantes de la isla queda marcado por el recuerdo de los bombardeos. Siguen a Homar, un rebelde y activista, que cruza la isla desmilitarizada en una motocicleta que tiene una trompeta soldada al silenciador. Así, al aparato para reducir sonido se le cambia su sentido original para producir un estridente llamado de atención, que le da un nuevo panorama sonoro a áreas de la isla antes expuestas a las detonaciones.
-“Instrumento de Protesta” de Felipe Águila (escultura)
Felipe Águila expuso hasta el 5 de enero su obra “Strumento di protesta- Opera Latinoamericana”, en la Galería Cívica de Arte Moderna y Contemporánea de Turín, en conmemoración del 69° aniversario de la liberación de Italia. El chileno Felipe Águila vuelve a la imposición del toque de queda durante la dictadura y al silencio quebrado durante las noches de protesta por el sonido de los “cacerolazos, que dialogaban de una casa a otra, de un barrio al otro de la ciudad”. El artista construye una verdadera batería, un instrumento musical donde las ollas son los tambores, las tapaderas son los platillos y las cucharas de madera son las baquetas.
Paralelamente abriremos Radetzky Loop, una instalación realizada por Iván Navarro en colaboración con el músico Atom™. Esta obra se sitúa en el campo de la estética de la resistencia, porque re-significa un neumático, regularmente utilizado para fines muy distintos a los de este proyecto. Por un lado, la rueda de camión de transporte de minerales como el cobre que cumple la importante función de trasladar el popularmente llamado “Sueldo de Chile” (que son las utilidades obtenidas por la empresa gubernamental CODELCO, provenientes de la venta de cobre). Y por otro lado, ironiza dicha función energética como una gran barricada para marchas y protestas callejeras, que resalta su dramatismo interrumpiendo flujos de tránsito peatonal y sonoro.
El neumático se transforma en una micro sala de escucha, donde el visitante se sumerge en un espacio industrial e íntimo, con fragmentos de sonidos de la popular marcha Radeztky. Los sonidos activan la memoria al poder militar, posiblemente grabada en el inconsciente colectivo social.
Lo anterior será acompañado de un concierto a cargo del músico Atom™.
Programa:
Inauguración Radetzky Loop – IVÁN NAVARRO. 21 de marzo 2015
Intervención sonora Atom™//Radetzky Loops Live -21 de marzo 2015, Teatro Principal Matucana 100
Exhibición: 21 de marzo al 21 de abril, Galería Concreta.
March 30, 2015 Iván Navarro: Feio https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/ivan-navarro-feio/Artists: Iván Navarro and Ricardo Muñoz.
Feio
February 12, 2015
Sketch
Bogotá, Colombia
En la sala de proyectos se mostrará un atlas cartografiado del artista Iván Navarro. Este proyecto de dibujo llamado “FEO” surge a partir de su interés por la estética, la asimetría, el error, la rareza típicas de la individualidad humana. Esta exposición está acompañada por el lanzamiento de la publicación FEIO editada por La Silueta en el año 2014.
En la sala princcipal de la galería, Ricardo Muñon Izquierdo, mostrará obra sobre papel producida en los últimos cuatro años. A través de yuxtaposiciones absurdas de iconos del arte, con humor, cinismo, y deformación alegórica acentúa tensiones dialéctivas entre lo público y lo privado, lo culto y lo marginal.
March 5, 2015 Iván Navarro: Nadie sabe para quien trabaja https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/ivan-navarro-nadie-sabe-para-quien-trabaja/Artists: Courtney Smith and Iván Navarro
Nadie sabe para quien trabaja
November 19 – December 16, 2014
M. Edeler & Sons
Brooklyn, NY, USA
Nadie Sabe Para Quien Trabaja was created as a sculptural installation that was activated in a performance-dinner that took place on November 12th, 2014. The work on view is a large-scale two-part sculpture, the conjoined work of Courtney Smith and Iván Navarro.
December 11, 2014 Iván Navarro: The Music Room https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/ivan-navarro-music-room/Artist: Iván Navarro
The Music Room
With Hueso Records
MoMA PS1, NY Art Book Fair and Printed Matter
New York, USA
Iván Navarro with Hueso Records is pleased to present The Music Room, at the NY Art Book Fair presented by Printed Matter, at MoMA PS1, opening Thursday September 25th from 6 to 9 pm. Room #S201.
The Music Room is a self-contained project room within the fair, where visitors are invited to listen to musical recordings pressed onto vinyl, at a single central playing station, controlled by one record handler. Inspired by the 1958 Bengali film by the same title (Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room), the installation seeks to create a sensorially rich environment conducive to the experience of listening. Records, selected from Hueso Records’ collection, are played one at a time and the sound is transmitted into the atmosphere through a pair of hand-built speakers. The interior, designed by artist Courtney Smith, is a wall-to-wall padded spongy lounge, with reconfigurable foam alleys, terraces and alcoves where listeners can curl up and contemplate. The Music Room wall space will contain a wrap-around display of the records and various types of publications that Hueso Records is presenting – a combination of HR productions, guest participations, and its private collection of music made by artists.
The Music Room is a multi-disciplinary, collaborative project that celebrates the creation of music both formal and informal, and in such is particularly interested in music made by artists who are not necessarily musicians. It will feature a collection of historic recordings by visual and performance artists, as well as recordings of live performances and experiments that are otherwise forgotten, among them are recordings by Lawrence Weiner, La Monte Young, Martin Kippenberger, Rita Ackermann / Dave Nuss, Christian Marclay and many more. Other categories presented in The Music Room are visual and conceptual artists who use music as their primary medium, or collaborations between visual and musical artists, or performance artists whose work involves music. Among the many artists, musicians and artist non-musicians whose work is presented in The Music Room are New York-based Cecilia Vicuña, Rio-based Jarbas Lopes, London-based group Tetine, Chile-based Mario Navarro, and New York-based collective Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere. Finally, Hueso Records’ own publications will also be presented, among them vinyl releases of music by Alvaro Peña, Atom™, Tunde Adebimpe, and Leonino aka Jorge Gonzalez.
Hueso Records is a music label conceived and run by visual artist Iván Navarro. HR began releasing recorded projects in Brooklyn, NY in 2006 as a way of independently publishing music made in collaboration for Navarro’s sculpture and video works. The label quickly expanded to include an ambitious program of finding and releasing historic Chilean music that was never produced at the time of its original recording such as the Pinochet Boys from 1988, Electrodomesticos from 1990, Minimal Technology from 1994 and Acid Call from 2007. HR developed a division called “Undefined Records”, publishing the music of non-musician artists and thinkers, but balances this by publishing creative and experimental projects with established professional musicians. HR currently works with artists and musicians in the US, Chile, Brazil, France, Germany and England.
October 8, 2014 Alexander Apóstol, Iván Navarro, Amalia Pica and Gabriel Sierra: Under the Same Sun https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/alexander-apostol-ivan-navarro-amalia-pica-gabriel-sierra-sun/Artists: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Carlos Amorales, Armando Andrade Tudela, Alexander Apóstol, Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer, Mariana Castillo Deball, Alejandro Cesarco, Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, Adriano Costa, Minerva Cuevas, Jonathas de Andrade, Wilson Díaz, Juan Downey, Rafael Ferrer, Regina José Galindo, Mario García Torres, Dominique González-Foerster, Tamar Guimaraes, Federico Herrero, Alfredo Jaar, Claudia Joskowicz, Runo Lagomarsino, David Lamelas, Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, Marta Minujín, Carlos Motta, Iván Navarro, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Orozco, Amalia Pica, Wilfredo Prieto, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Gabriel Sierra, Javier Téllez, Erika Verzutti, and Carla Zaccagnini.
Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today
June 13 – October 1, 2014
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
New York, USA
Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today reconsiders the state of contemporary art in Latin America, investigating the creative responses of artists to complex, shared realities that have been influenced by colonial and modern histories, repressive governments, economic crises, and social inequality, as well as by concurrent periods of regional economic wealth, development, and progress. The exhibition presents contemporary artistic responses to the past and present that are inscribed within this highly nuanced situation, exploring the assertions of alternative futures.
Organized by Pablo León de la Barra, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, Under the Same Sun features works by 40 artists and collaborative duos from 15 countries. The artworks are organized around five themes: “Conceptualism and its Legacies,” “Tropicologies,” “Political Activism,” “Modernism and its Failures,” and “Participation/Emancipation.”
June 19, 2014 Iván Navarro: Mellowdrama https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/ivan-navarro-mellowdrama/
Artists: Courtney Smith & Iván Navarro
Mellowdrama
March 7 – 15, 2014
Hotel Particulier / The Armory Show
New York City, NY, USA
Hotel Particulier is pleased to present an experimental and collaborative artwork between artists Courtney Smith and Iván Navarro entitled MELLOWDRAMA. The artists will curate events and performances in collaboration with Hotel Particulier and Emilie Baltz for a full week during and following the Armory Show.
A “stage” will be created in the space by Courtney Smith, illuminated by Iván Navarro and activated, occupied and transformed by the different performances, musical events and participations by the artists’ guests as well as a series of staged dinners curated by Emilie Baltz. During the day, Hotel Particulier curated shop will take center stage with a special collaboration with AHAlife.
The stage will be unveiled on the evening of March 7th with a reception and experimental musical performance conceived by Iván Navarro. The following nights will involve a series of staged dinners entitled traces, curated by Emilie Baltz, gathering 20 guests around an eating experience that uses the stage/table as canvas, tracing the interactions of guests by engaging them in a hands on dinner. On closing night March 15th, the stage will be activated through a series of performances by novelist, academic and cultural critic Barbara Browning and her guests.
Courtney Smith is known for her furniture-based sculpture and her investigation into the physical and psychological construction of interior spaces through the deconstruction of the elements that compose them, and Iván Navarro is widely recognized for his innovative work addressing the complex implications of transformation and transference of electrical energy through his ingeniously crafted luminous sculpture. Both artists are based in Brooklyn.
Smith and Navarro have collaborated regularly since 2005, and have exhibited their joint work in various galleries and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, and most recently at the Goethe Institute in Nairobi.
Both Courtney Smith and Iván Navarro are exhibiting work in The Armory Show 2014 with Baró, the São Paulo-based gallery that represents both artists, both their individual and collaborative work.
Iván Navarro (Chile, 1972) is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Navarro’s work transcends its Minimalist roots by employing mass-produced materials to build powerfully symbolic objects that effectively infiltrate the domestic realm they mimic. His socio-politically charged sculptures in neon, fluorescent or incandescent light double as functional elements, integrated in the physical space they inhabit. His work has been shown in museums and galleries all over the world, including his participation in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, and in such venues as The Hayward Gallery, London; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; MOCA Goldman Warehouse, Miami; Whitney Museum at Altria, New York; Witte de Witt, Rotterdam, Caja de Burgos, Spain, Towner Art Museum, Eastbourne UK, among many others. He is also the creator and director of the music label Hueso Records.
March 21, 2014 Iván Navarro: Nacht und Nebel https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/ivan-navarro-nacht-und-nebel/Nacht und Nebel
Galerie Daniel Templon
Brussels, Belgium
Chilean artist Iván Navarro is exhibiting his work in Brussels for the first time, with Nacht und Nebel, an installation of trompe-l’œillight sculptures that explore memories of the Second World War.
Presented for the first time at La Fondazione Volume! in Rome in 2012, and curated by Antonio Arevalo, the installation recalls the atmosphere of Italy under Nazi occupation and the bombing campaigns of 1943-1944. It comprises six geometric light wells — circle, triangle and rectangle — constructed of brick and cement. Each sculpture spells out a word in neon, with mirrors used to project the word infinitely: ODIO, OCCHIO, EX, BECCO, ECCIDIO, etc. Plunged into darkness, the gallery thus seems to open onto endless light-filled passages, metaphors for both escape and disappearance.
Navarro seeks to trigger a different attitude to history, exploring the ambiguities of memory. Every illuminated word possesses both real substance and illusory density. Language becomes an illuminated manifestation of conscience, referencing double meanings and the painful chasms that separate appearance from truth.
For the Project Room, Ivan Navarro created two new pieces that play on the theme of ambivalence, whether formal or linguistic. Two purified wells invite the visitors to look at the words Above all and All of the Above, phrases normally self-contained in their meaning, but with new significance in the context of these works. Set in relation with an older piece, Defect — an ambiguous word because of its double meaning as an noun or verb — these works form a set that manages to subtly transform structure into an act of communication.
Born in Chile in 1972 and now a resident of New York, Iván Navarro uses light as his raw material. Turning everyday objects into electric sculptures and transforming the exhibition space by means of visual interplays, his work appropriates the language of minimalism in order to develop understated political and social criticism. Having grown up under the Pinochet dictatorship, Iván Navarro is haunted by questions of power, control and imprisonment, both physical and psychological. The title of this latest exhibition refers to Adolph Hitler’s 1941 decree that ordered the Third Reich’s opponents to be spirited away in “the night and the fog” (nacht und nebel) – a death sentence. The decree’s initials, NN, are the same as those used in Latin American for the disappeared, those No Names Iván Navarro’s works so often invoke.
Iván Navarro represented Chile at the 53th Venice Biennale in 2009. His work has been shown worldwide, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York (2006), Museo del Barrio, New York (2007), MOCA, Miami (2007), Fundación Caja de Burgos (2010), La Maison Rouge and Frost Art Museum in Miami in 2012. He took part in the Light Show exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (London) in 2013. His work features in a great many international collections, such as the Saatchi Collection (London), Martin Z. Margulies Collection (Miami), Hirshorn Museum (Washington, D.C.), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond), Fonds National d’Art Contemporain and Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création (Paris). He will be installing a monumental in situ project in New York’s Madison Square Park on 20 February 2014, This Land Is Your Land. The installation will feature the giant water towers that are such an integral part of the New York cityscape, reflecting neon messages to create the illusion of infinite space.
Translated from Spanish
Electricity is the foundation of my work. Thanks to it, sculptures and installations can be perceived, and at the same time understood in different levels of relationships with the space that surrounds them, with the encircling architecture, with their social context or with spectators that directly interact with the work in a physical and psychological way.
The work’s content is in part due to the experiences during the period of dictatorship in Chile (1973-1989). This was a period which exerted great violence, intimidation and misinformation on the citizens. This climate of social instability also made evident an alert in the face of the lack of connection between the real and the apparent.
In another level of relationships, the works have a dialogue with the history of design and modern art, subverting its formal purity with their social content. The works presented here use electricity as power source, with a broad meaning: the electrical lights that often celebrate or honor a situation, show here the other side of their luminosity, i.e., darkness and fear, as simultaneous homage to seduction and alienation.
La electricidad es la base fundamental de mi trabajo, gracias a ella las esculturas e instalaciones pueden ser percibidas y al mismo tiempo, comprendidas en distintos niveles de relaciones con el espacio que las rodea; con la arquitectura circundante, con su contexto social o con espectadores que interactúan directamente con el trabajo en forma física y psicológica.
El contenido de las obras, en parte se debe a experiencias vividas durante el periodo de dictadura en Chile (1973-1989). Periodo que ejerció gran violencia, intimidación y desinformación en la ciudadanía. Este clima de inestabilidad social también evidenció una alerta ante la evidente desconexión entre lo aparente y lo verdadero.
En otro nivel de relaciones, los trabajos mantienen un dialogo con la historia del diseño y del arte moderno, subvirtiendo su pureza formal con sus contenidos sociales.
Los trabajos aquí presentados, ocupan la electricidad como fuente de poder con un amplio significado: las luces eléctricas que muchas veces celebran o festejan una situación, aquí muestran el otro lado de su luminosidad, es decir, la oscuridad y el miedo. Como homenajes simultáneos a la seducción y a la alienación.
Selected Biographical Information
Education / Training
- 1991-1995: Licenciado en Artes Visuales, Mención Grabado, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
Prizes / Fellowships
- 2009: Altazor, Premio Nacional a las Artes Visuales, Chile.
- 2007: Fondart, Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Cultural y las Artes, Santiago, Chile.
- 2006: Beca Fundación Joan Mitchell, New York, USA.
- 2005: -A.S.A.P, Kamp Kippy, Maine, USA.
- 2002: Residencia Gasworks, Programa de Intercambio Cultural Gasworks, Londres, UK.
- 2002: -Fondart, Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Cultural y las Artes, Santiago, Chile.
- 2001: Art OMI, Residencia Internacional de Artistas, New York, USA.
- 2001: Fondart, Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Cultural y las Artes, Santiago, Chile.
- 2001: Fondart, Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Cultural y las Artes, Santiago, Chile.
Solo Exhibitions
- 2014: “Past Imperfect”, Izolyatsia Foundation, Donetsk, Ukraine.
- 2014: “This Land is Your Land”, Madison Square Park, New York, USA.
- 2013: “Where is the Next War?”, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France.
- 2012: “Iván Navarro: Fluorescent light Sculptures”, Frost Art Museum, Miami, USA.
- 2012: “Nacht und Nebel”, Fondazione VOLUME!, Rome, Italy.
Group Exhibitions
- 2013: “Light Show”, Hayward Gallery, London, UK.
- 2012: “Eleventh Havana Biennial”, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, Havana, Cuba.
- 2012: “Neon–Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?”, La Maison Rouge, Paris, France.
- 2011: “Permanent Collection (Courtney Smith and Iván Navarro)”, ICA Boston, Boston, USA.
- 2010: “Cairo, International Biennale”, Cairo, Egypt.
Publications
- Lauson, Cliff. “Light Art: An Immaterial Material”, (exh cat), Edit. SouthBank Centre, Londres, Reino Unido, 2013
- Rosenberg, David. “Le Néon Dans L’art des Années 1940 à nos jours – Néon: Who’s afraid of red, yellow and blue?”, (exh cat), Edit. Archibooks et La mansion rouge, Paris, Francia, 2012.
- Herzberg, Julia P. “Rethinking the Possible – Iván Navarro, Fluorescent Light Sculptures” (exh cat), Edit. The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum Universidad Internacional de Florida, Miami, USA, 2012.
- Saavedra, Ana María y Alarcón, Luis. “Galería Metropolitana 2004-2010…”, Pachamama, Iván Navarro + Hueso Records (exh cat), Edit. Galería Metropolitana, Santiago, Chile, 2011.
- Flores, Tatiana. “¡El espectador está iluminado!” (exh cat), Edit. Caja de Burgos, Burgos, España, 2010.
Additional Links
- Iván Navarro Frost Art Museum, Miami
- ¿Dónde es la próxima guerra?
- Iván Navarro y su faceta musical: “En Chile, la música es más interesante que el arte”
- Ivan Navarro – Nacht und Nebel
- L’intervista / Ivan Navarro