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Indepth Arts News:
"Cildo Meireles"
1999-11-19 until 2000-03-04
New Museum of Contemporary Art
New York, NY,
USA United States of America
This first New York retrospective of the work of Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles will
consist of room-scale installations, walk-through environments, and sculptures spanning a
twenty-five year period. Generally acknowledged as the most influential conceptual artist
working in Latin America today, Meireles (b. 1948) creates pieces that require the
spectator to abandon the traditionally passive role of the museum visitor and to arrive at a
heightened sensory and cognitive perception through direct interaction with the
installation.
Shaped by the prevailing political, cultural and social conditions in Brazil
during the dictatorships of the 1960s, 70s, and recent years, Meireles' work is associated
with such Brazilian Neo-Concretists as Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica. His singular
contribution is to synthesize his own experiments in formal space with philosophical,
social and political concerns. A Meireles environment creates an independent world that
crosses boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical, the outside and the inside,
the concrete and the immaterial. The exhibition will include the spectacular Fontes
(1992), consisting of a small room converted into a labyrinth by suspending hundreds of
identical rulers from its ceiling, mounting hundreds of clocks around the perimeter and
covering its floor with hundreds of tiny plastic numbers. To stress the physical limits of
measurement, the artist constructs a space where movement is hampered by the tools used
to quantify time and space. The exhibition is organizeded by Senior Curator Dan
Cameron and Adjunct Curator Gerardo Mosquera. An illustrated catalogue will include
essays by Dan Cameron, Gerardo Mosquera, and Paulo Herkenhoff and Catherine David.
Photo:
Cildo Meireles, Entrevendo [Glimpsing], 1970-94.
Wood, heat source, fan, ice, salt, and sugar, 354 x 118. Installation view, Capp Street Projects,
San Francisco. Courtesy of the artist. © 1994 Cildo Meireles.
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