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Indepth Arts News:
"Ernesto Neto: THE Malmo Experience"
2006-02-18 until 2006-05-01
Malmo Konsthall
Malmo, ,
SE Sweden
Ernesto Neto works with abstract installations which often take up the
entire exhibition space. His materials are gossamer-thin, light,
stretchable fabrics in nylon or cotton. Like fine membranes fixed to the
ceiling by long, stretched threads his works hang down into the room and
create shapes that are almost organic. Sometimes they are filled with
scented spices and hang in tear-shaped forms like gigantic mushrooms or
huge stockings, sometimes he creates peculiar soft sculptures which the
visitor is allowed to feel through small openings in the surface. He also
creates spatial labyrinths which the visitor can enter and thereby
experience the work and interact with it.
Neto's art is a sensual experience which creates associations with the
body and with something organic. He describes his works as an exploration
and a representation of the body's landscape from within. It is important
to Neto that the viewer should actively interact with and physically
experience his work by feeling, smelling, and touching it.
For Malmö Konsthall Neto will create a completely new work which he is
calling The Malmö Experience. The exhibition in Malmö will provide an
extensive overview and synopsis of Neto‚s oeuvre and contain a number of
important works which will be presented in a new way. In a huge "organic
labyrinth" of fabrics and shapes, which takes up the entire exhibition
space, the visitor can experience the work from both inside and outside.
The exhibition is based on the colours of the rainbow and the body
labyrinth/organism consists of a number of smaller spaces which together
constitute the whole.
Ernesto Neto is considered one of the absolute leaders of Brazil's
contemporary art scene. His inspiration comes partly from Brazilian
neo-concretism. At the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 60s the
movement‚s best-known proponents, Lygia Clarc and Hélio Oiticica, rejected
modernism‚s ideas of autonomous geometric abstraction. Instead, they
wanted to equate art with living organisms in a kind of organic
architecture, and invite the viewer to be an active participant.
Ernesto Neto was born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he lives
and works. He has had a long series of exhibitions around the world,
including the Freud Museum, Vienna 2005; Domain de Kerguéhennec, Centre
d‚art contemporain, France, 2005; Centro Cultural São Paolo, 2004; the
Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, Kunsthalle Basel,
2003; Århus Kunstbygning, 2002; the Brazilian pavilion at the Venice
Biennale, 2002; the XXIV Bienal International de São Paolo, 1998 and the
Sydney Biennial, 1998.
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