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Museum of Contemporary Art in Puerto Rico shows Leopoldo Maler's "Intoxications"

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Written by rubin   
Tuesday, 23 June 2009 02:53

Leopoldo Maler - Silencio, 1971. Installation View - Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art in Puerto Rico

SAN JUAN, PR - Leopoldo Maler’s artistic career, launched in 1964, spans the troubled times of Late Modernity while resorting to those processes by which art objects and interventions are defined today: installation, expanded painting, film, theater, perfomance… each of which languages, submitted to relentless experimentation, seeks to spell out the metaphors and rituals we live by. Intoxications brings together his milestones and pioneering works in a sort of retrospective, in as much as, according to Maler, "every exposed work already belongs to the artist’s past." The idea of the toxic merges the excess implied by any work of art, with that state of extreme lucidity which transforms artistic vision into an object exposed in the open field of public experience. Thus, from its very title, the artist warns us about the nature of his ways of doing, and about the effect he hopes to achieve on his audience.

Leopoldo Maler - Hommage Photo by Kike Arnal , NY TimesIntoxications includes works of the ‘70s, the ‘80s, the ‘90s and the 2000s: from Silence (1971), an early mixed media including film, up to works like Metrobolismo (2004), a recent performance done in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which joins, within an installation framework, specific documentation condensed into a visual metaphor of urban social life. Some "flat works" included in the show challenge the limits of painting: by accumulating materials, gestures and themes on a bidimensional surface, the artist forces himself to surrender the richness of tridimensional space. Such austere surrender is also an excess. On view through 20 September, 2009.

Leopoldo Maler (1937) was born in Buenos Aires, and has developed his entire work commuting between his city of birth, England, the Dominican Republic, and several cities in the United States. He has represented his homeland at the Sao Paulo and Venice Biennials, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has presented his works in world-class venues such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Whitechapel Gallery and the Hayward Gallery in London. His works are included in important private collections, as well as in museum collections in Europe and the Americas.

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