Brazilian Cildo Meireles Major Survey coming to Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
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| Thursday, 15 January 2009 03:17 |
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On view from June 7 to September 27, 2009, Cildo Meireles was organized by Tate Modern in London and curated by independent writer and curator Guy Brett and Vicente Todolí, director, Tate Modern, with Amy Dickson, assistant curator, Tate Modern. “Cildo Meireles is one of the most fascinating and influential Latin American artists of our time, and we look forward to giving U.S. audiences their first chance to explore his career in such depth,” said Peter C. Marzio, MFAH director. “With this exhibition, the MFAH continues its commitment to advancing scholarship and public appreciation of contemporary Latin American art. Cildo Meireles will offer our visitors another powerful experience with one of the region’s leading artists, following on the MFAH’s 2006 presentation of Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color and 2004’s Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America.” The MFAH is one of the few museums in the country with a single gallery large enough to accommodate the monumental installations in Cildo Meireles. The exhibition will be presented in the expansive, 22,000-square-foot Upper Brown Pavilion of the museum’s Caroline Wiess Law Building designed by Mies Van der Rohe. The exhibition begins with work from the artist’s early career, when he was focused on exploring extreme notions of scale. Objects from this period include his Mutações Geográficas (Geographical Mutations) (1969), a small leather case that holds earth taken from the rival states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, compressing Brazil’s vast terrain into a carry-on; and Southern Cross (1969-70), a cube of pressed oak and pine, trees that were sacred to Brazil’s native peoples. Meireles also started to probe the idea of space as a network for circulation, and explore ways that he could subvert established networks under Brazil’s repressive military regime. For one of his most well-known pieces, Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos (Insertions into Ideological Circuits) (1970), Meireles printed Who Killed Herzog?—a reference to a journalist who died at government hands—on paper currency and Yankees Go Home, on circulating Coca-Cola bottles. By the mid-1970s Meireles had begun to experiment with complex, walk-in installations. Eight of these are presented in this show, and each one involves entering a very distinctive environment. They include Desvio para o Vermelho (Red Shift) (1967-1984), a suite of rooms thoroughly furnished in red, with a trail of spilled crimson that leads you to a third, darkened room; Eureka/Blindhotland (1970-75), a floor strewn with 201 rubber balls that look the same size but don’t have the same weight when you pick them up; and another curtained environment, Missão Missões (How to Build Cathedrals) (1987), that presents a glowing canopy of 2,000 bleached cow bones, a floor that shimmers with 600,000 pennies piled in a mound and a single, ropelike column of 800 communion wafers connecting the two. This piece was commissioned to commemorate the first Jesuit settlements in Brazil, in the early 1600s, and addresses the human cost of missionary conversions of native peoples.  Sound is essential to Meireles’ work. Visitors hear the crush of glass shards cracking underfoot as they make their way through a maze of barriers in Através (Through) (1983-1989), the thump of balls set loose and tossed around in Eureka/Blindhotland, and the barely audible, dissonant babbling emitted by 800 radios in his towering 2001 construction, Babel. They also hear only their own breathing and muffled steps as they press ahead in Volátil (1980/1994), a darkened room filled with talcum powder and the smell of what seems to be natural gas, with a burning candle as the only source of light. Cildo Meireles was born in 1948 in Rio de Janeiro, where he now lives and works. His father worked for the Indian Protection Service. As a boy, Meireles and his family constantly moved throughout the vast Brazilian territory; glimpses of these childhood experiences often appear in his work. Among a generation of artists who began to work with conceptual installations, Meireles was also influenced by Brazil’s Neo Concrete movement of the late 1950s. Led by Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, they rejected the dominant style of geometric abstraction in favor of more participatory works that engage the body and the mind. Meireles began showing in Brazil in the late 1960s, and over four decades has participated in the preeminent international biennials as well as in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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