Miami Art Museum Presents Exhibition of Interactive Works by Carlos Cruz-Diez

Written by Sandra Collingswood Wednesday, 27 July 2011 15:25

MIAMI, FL.- The Miami Art Museum presents an exhibition of interactive works by Carlos Cruz-Diez (b. 1923, Caracas), one of Latin America’s most important living masters. "Carlos Cruz-Diez: The Embodied Experience of Color" marks the artist’s first exhibition to focus solely on sensory chromatic environments and interactive projects. The exhibition will feature four participatory environments created from color and light including Cromosaturación (Chromosaturation), a groundbreaking artwork first conceived in 1965. On view 20 March through 20 June, 2010.

Cruz-Diez, a major figure in the international Kinetic art movement, was recently selected to create a signature artwork feature for the new Miami Marlins Stadium’s four-acre entrance plaza, one of the largest of any stadium in United States history, that will use a paving system based on color, line and viewer perception as visual signage to the various stadium entrances.

The four installations comprising "Carlos Cruz-Diez: The Embodied Experience of Color" rely upon the visitors participation through movement. Cromosaturación (Chromosaturation), 1968, is a site-specific environment that focuses on the relationship between color and perception. Initially conceived in 1965 and presented for the first time in 1968 in the Ostwald Museum in Dortmund, Germany, this work consists of three separate color chambers infused with red, green and blue light. The real content of this work is the visitor's experience of walking through the shifting chromatic space and interacting over time through his physical movement. Duchas de inducción cromática (Showers of Chromatic Induction), 1968, one of the artist’s first experiments with the idea of color in space, allows the visitor to experience color through a series of booths made from strips of transparent, colored plastic. Ambiente cromointerferente (Chromo-interferent Environment), 1974, is a changing, three-dimensional chromatic projection environment activated by the physical movement of the spectator/participant. Experiencia cromática aleatoria interactiva (Aleatory Interactive Chromatic Experience), 1995, an interactive computer installation, lets the spectator create his own visual interpretation of Cruz-Diez' work.

"Carlos Cruz-Diez: The Embodied Experience of Color" explores the artist's pioneering contribution to experimental practices in the 1960s and 1970s that proposed the dematerialization of the object to create environments that involve the body, senses and subjectivity of the spectator. In his experimentation with color and perceptual structures, Cruz-Diez proposed new definitions for the art work as a field of active participation through the use of light, movement and space. Cruz-Diez’s experimentations with color and sensory perceptual environments anticipated many of the relational and participatory concerns of contemporary art.

“The works in this exhibition extend the principle of interactivity from which Cruz Diez' entire body of work emerged,” said Miami Art Museum Adjunct Curator Rina Carvajal. “They propose a total immersion of the spectator in the experience of color in movement, requiring his corporal, sensorial and mental involvement with color as a changing temporal-spatial phenomenon.”

Carlos Cruz-Diez was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1923, and has lived and worked in Paris since 1960. His artistic experimentations have expanded notions about color, and he has created several major series of works that explore the optical effects of color including "Fisicromías" (Physichromies), "Transcromías" (Transchromies), "Inducciones Cromáticas" (Chromatic Inductions) and "Cromosaturaciones" (Chromosaturations).

His work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among other institutions. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as "Tour Eiffel haute en Couleurs", Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2003); "Inverted Utopias: Avant Garde Art in Latin America", Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2004); "Lo(s) Cinético(s)", Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2007). Among his solo exhibitions are Retrospectiva, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas (1981); "Carlos Cruz-Diez: Autonomie der Farbe", Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop (1988); "In(formed) by Color: Carlos Cruz-Diez", Americas Society, Nueva York (2008); El color sucede, Museu d’Art Espanyol Contemporani, Palma de Mallorca (2009).

Visit The Miami Art Museum at : http://www.miamiartmuseum.org/

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