Victor Grippo: Works 1971-2001
March 24 – June 18, 2006
Anna Maria Maiolino: Territories of Immanence
March 24 – June 18, 2006
MIAMI ART CENTRAL
5960 SW 57 Avenue
Miami, FL 33143
305.455.3333
Tuesday-Sunday 12-7 pm
www.miamiartcentral.org
Students and children under 12: Free<br>
Free on Sundays
Victor Grippo: Works 1971-2001
From March 24 -June 18, 2006, Miami Art Central (MAC) will present Victor Grippo: Works 1971-2001, the artists first comprehensive exhibition in the United States. Victor Grippo (19362002) is one of the most influential figures in the history of Argentine art. His artistic universe, a singular blend of conceptualism and alchemy, provokes continuous associations between art, science, and daily life.
From his early training as a chemist, Grippo acquired a fascination with science and experimentation that he incorporated into his artistic practice. He had a particular inclination for the organization of systems and the exploration and modification of phenomena. His investigations, which constantly allude to the transformation of matter and the spirit, manifest the instability and constant movement of things toward new realities. They convert the frugal nature of the most humble, common object into a powerful metaphor for latent energy.
Many of Grippos sculptures and installations revolve around the distinct forms, processes, and rituals of nourishment. He employs for example, the modest, perishable potato to create associations referring to the modification of consciousness, thus seeking to achieve a changed consciousness through a changed material. In the installation Analogy I (1970-77), an extensive configuration of potatoes is placed on tables, platforms, and chairs and connected to electrodes and cables. A voltmeter measures the electrical charge generated by the potatoes. The text that accompanies the piece hints at their ability to metamorphose into different states: from nature to food to consciousness, and, finally, spiritual energy.
Tables also occupy a fundamental place in Grippos work. They function both as themetestifying to the confluence and transmutation of experience and memoryand support. Board (1978) presents a simple, worn table inscribed with text. By describing the use of the table over time the text revives traces of a life: meals prepared and shared with others, work, dreams and hopes, some drawings, some poems, some metaphysical intention accompanying reality. In Life-Death-Resurrection (1980), Grippo places beans and water inside geometrically shaped lead containers. Unseen, the seeds germinate and slowly break through the metallic forms that contain them, manifesting powerfullyas do the potatoes and the tableenergy and the continuity of life.
Grippos transposition of objects of daily life into artistic discourse creates an inexhaustible current of analogies, producing a totally new system of connecting those things that we see without seeing…and which we use without knowing they contain energy. Much of his work seems to offer a space for reconciliation and passage. Marked by the action of a minimal gesture (an inscription, immersion into water), ordinary objects become charged with meaning, revealing their potential for assimilation and mobility. Operating on multiple levels of experience, the everyday elements chosen by Grippo convey a notion of existence as an ongoing process of erasure and reconstruction.
About the Artist
Son of Italian immigrants, Victor Grippo was born in Junín, Province of Buenos Aires, in 1936. His major solo shows include those held at Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte, Buenos Aires (2001); a retrospective at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1995); Museo de Arte Contemporánea Carillo Gil, Mexico City (1994); Fawbush Projects, New York (1991); Fundación San Telmo, Buenos Aires (1988); Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud, São Paulo (1984); and at Galería Artemúltiple, Buenos Aires (1976, 1980). Most recently, his work has been included in prestigious international exhibitions including: Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s, Queens Museum of Art, New York (1999), Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998), Art from Argentina 1920-1994, The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1994), Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1993); Transcontinental: Nine Latin American Artists, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (1990). Victor Grippo died in Buenos Aires in February of 2002.
Exhibition
Victor Grippo: Works 1971-2001 will include 30 worksinstallations, photographic documentation of urban actions, boxes, and environments, as well as the large-scale installation Mesas de trabajo y reflexión presented in 2002 at Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany. Curated by Marcelo E. Pacheco, chief curator of the Museo de Arte Latino Americano de Buenos Aires (MALBA)-Colección Costantini, this exhibition provides an overdue recognition of this artist. This exhibition was organizad by Malba Colección Costantini, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
This exhibition is on view from March 24th through June 18th, 2006 at Miami Art Central. An opening reception will take place on Thursday, March 23rd, from 7:00 to 10:00 pm. Please RSVP via e-mail to info@miamiartcentral.org or by phone 305.455.3336. Miami Art Centrals presentation of this exhibition is sponsored by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation.
Exhibition Catalogue and Brochure Victor Grippo: Works 1971-2001 is accompanied by a bilingual (Spanish-English) catalogue including new texts written specifically for this project by Ana Longoni, Adriana Lauria, Guy Brett, Lillian llanes, Justo Pastor Mellado and Angeline Scherf. The essays are illustrated by one hundred and fifty reproductions of works in the exhibition, as well as previously unexhibited sketches and drawings. In addition, the exhibition includes an anthology of the artists unpublished writings, making it the most comprehensive publication on the artist to date.
The catalogue can be purchased at the admissions desk.
Visitors to the show are provided with a variety of education materials and programs, including a free, illustrated brochure designed to provide information concerning the artist and the exhibition and its related programs and events.
Anna Maria Maiolino: Territories of Immanence Anna Maria Maiolino: Territories of Immanence is the first retrospective exhibition of this artist in the United States. One of the most important artists of her generation working in Brazil, Maiolino has always sought to connect art and lifeto give structure to primordial experiences of language, self, and the body. Her work breaks down the limits of objects and medium and address issues of subjectivity and the idea that language is constantly remaking itself. The ongoing, unfinished nature of her practice flows out of a dialogue between opposite yet complementary categories that dissolve the dichotomies of inner and outer, self and other, void and matter, ancestral and contemporary.
Maiolinos drawings, paintings, sculptures, books, engravings, films, videos, installations, and performances often emphasize the immanence of the act over the concept of a permanent object. Her early artistic experiments connect her to key moments of Brazilian art history: the New Figuration movement, neo-Concretism, and New Brazilian Objectivity. Later, she was associated with the neo-Avant-garde in Europe (particularly in Italy) and Minimalism and Conceptualism in the United States.
Born in Calabria, Italy, in 1942, Maiolino immigrated with her family to South America in 1954, living first in Venezuela, then moving to Rio de Janeiro in 1960. The instability and displacement inherent in her personal history has permeated the methods of her art. Her work is linked to ideas of fertility and physical and spiritual sustenance and draws upon narratives related to the self, language, and labor as well as metaphors from the feminine imagery in daily life. These narratives connect endless chains of people, gestures, and processes. They refer, through the actions of the body and its repeated gestures, to the making and remaking of the self in the encounter with others and the creation and experience of the art object.
During the 1960s, Maiolino was part of the New Figuration movement. In 1967, she took part in the exhibition New Brazilian Objectivity, organized by Hélio Oiticica. Her works from these years, primarily prints and paintings, are a form of resistance to the military regime in Brazil as well as a reaction against the countrys growing urban inequalities. They are also a meditation on the condition of women within a patriarchal society. Some of these pieces evoke the popular practice of string literature (literatura de cordel), a woodblock printing tradition of Brazils northeast that depicts poetic narrations of everyday themes of life in the city.
In 1968, Maiolino moved to New York and shifted away from representation toward Minimalism and Conceptualism. Returning to Brazil during the early 1970s, she began to experiment with drawing and objects made of paper, exploring spatial, corporeal, and existential issues that connect her work to the neo-Concrete practices of the period. Mental Maps (1971-74), Constructed Projects (1972), Print Objects (1971-72), Drawing Objects (1971-76), and her series Book Objects (1971-76) are some of the works from these years. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s she created installations, Super 8 films, paintings, drawings, washes, and projects that encouraged a performative interaction between the audience and the art object.
In 1989 Maiolino moved to Rio de Janeiro from Buenos Aires and began to work with clay. Since then she has continued to explore this basic material, relying on traditional labor-intensive processes such as modeling, mold making, and casting. Maiolino emphasizes the repetition of gesture as a fundamental unit of artistic action through a series of installations involving hand-produced sculpture-objects. Produced in succession, each of these objects bears the mark of the artists hands. The clay registers memories of actions and also alludes to the emancipatory potential of the subject to remake him- or herself in the experience of the object. These pieces resonate with the spectators own experience, the repeated, often unconscious, actions of their everyday labors. In Many (1991-1995), for example, the artists gestures are multiplied in the intense accumulation and production of small, simple formsclay fashioned into balls or cylindersthat, in being shaped and reshaped, suggest the first utterance of language, functions of the body, hands kneading dough, the unfolding of time and memory, the self-renewing continuity of life.
About the Artist
Born in Italy and a Brazilian citizen since 1968, Anna Maria Maiolino studied in The Escuela Nacional Cristobal Rojas (Caracas), in the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (Rio de Janeiro) and in the International Pratt Graphics Center (New York). She has participated in exhibitions such as Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2005), Entre Outros/Territories of Immanence: A Retrospective (2005) at the Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, The Object Scuptur (2002) at the Henry Moore Institute, Virgin Territory: Women, Gender, and History in Contemporary Brazilian Art (2001) at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington , D.C., Vida Afora/A Life Line at the Drawing Center, New York (2001), N Vezes Um/N Times One (2001), installation and projection of Super 8 films and videos in the Art in General, New York, Beyond Perceptions:The Sixties Experiment (2000) at the Independent Curators International, New York, Re-Aligning Vision: Current Alternatives in South American Drawing (1997) first held in Museo del Barrio, New York, Inside the Visible (1995) first held at the Kanaal Art Foundation in Kortrijk, Belgium and at the ICA, Boston, and America – Bride of the Sun. 500 Years of Latin America and the Low Countries (1992) at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium.
In 2002, Anna Maria Maiolino Vida Afora/A Life Line (The Drawing Centers Press) was published covering the artists 45 years of production.
Exhibition
Anna Maria Maiolino: Territories of Immanence is co-organized by Miami Art Central and the Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo. Curated by Rina Carvajal and Paulo Venancio Filho, this exhibition will include 175 works in various media from the 1960s until today, providing an overdue recognition of this artist.
This exhibition is on view from March 24th through June 18th, 2006 at Miami Art Central. An opening reception will take place on Thursday, March 23rd, from 7:00 to 10:00 pm. Please RSVP via e-mail to info@miamiartcentral.org or by phone 305.455.3336.
Miami Art Centrals presentation of this exhibition is sponsored by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. MAC thanks TAM Brazilian Airlines for their generous support. Special thanks to Gonzalo Parodi, Marli Matzumoto and Galeria Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud.
Exhibition Catalogue and Brochure
Anna Maria Maiolino: Territories of Immanence is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, 178-page, full-color catalogue with essays by Catherine de Zegher, Marcio Doctors and Paulo Venancio Filho which can be purchased at the admissions desk. The catalogue is co- produced by the Miami Art Central and Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo.
Visitors to the show are provided with a variety of education materials and programs, including a free, illustrated brochure designed to provide information concerning the artist and the exhibition and its related programs and events.
Special Events for Anna Maria Maiolino and Victor Grippo Opening Weekend
Friday, March 24, 7:00 pm: Gallery Talk with art historian Paulo Venancio Filho
Co-curator of the exhibition Paulo Venancio Filho will give an insightful guided tour of the exhibition within the museum galleries. Venancio Filho is Associate Professor of Art History at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Saturday, March 25, 2005, 6:00 pm: Gallery Talk with the artist Anna Maria Maiolino
Join artist Anna Maria Maiolino as she discusses more than 30 years of work included in her current retrospective at MAC. This gallery talk will be in English/Spanish/Portuguese.
Saturday, March 25, 8:00 pm: Aquiles Báez performs Una Mirada al Sur
Venezuelan guitarist Aquiles Báez fuses his Latin roots with jazz, bringing new sounds to contemporary folklore. Báez has played with many renowned musicians such as Paquito de Rivera and Farred Haque, among others.
Miami Art Central (MAC) is a not-for-profit institution dedicated to the presentation of exhibitions and programs that explore contemporary art and culture. Our mission is to provide an alternative, experimental space with a multidisciplinary focus. MAC is committed to stimulating and nurturing a dialogue with the various communities of South Florida and beyond.
Support for Miami Art Central is provided by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation.