Ernesto Neto
The Malmö Experience
18 February-1 May 2006
Opening Friday, 17 February, 7-9 p.m.
MALMÖ KONSTHALL
S:t Johannesgatan 7, Box 17 127
SE-200 10 Malmö, Sweden
info.konsthall@malmo.se
www.konsthall.malmo.se
Members of the press are cordially invited to a preview at Malmö Konsthall Thursday, 16 February, at 11 a.m. Together with Ernesto Neto, director Lars Grambye will introduce the exhibition. Afterwards, at about 12 oclock, lunch will be served in the restaurant.
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.
Netos 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 bodys 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 Netos uvre 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 Brazils contemporary art scene. His inspiration comes partly from Brazilian neo-concretism. At the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 60s the movements best-known proponents, Lygia Clarc and Hélio Oiticica, rejected modernisms 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 dart 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.
For further information and images, please dont hesitate to contact lena.leeb@malmo.se
You can also download text and images from: www.konsthall.malmo.se
Next exhibition:
Simone Aaberg Kærn Open Sky 25 May 20 August 2006
Simone Aaberg Kærn is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen. Over the past decade she has worked with aerial flight as a pervasive theme in a series of video works, installations and performance frequently in combination with the historical and social representation of woman as a subject. The exhibition at Malmö Konsthall, her first major solo exhibition, is presented in the form of a journey a flight through aesthetic, historical and political landscapes. In a global perspective the sky and airspace is a place of conflict over prestige, politics and power. At the same time, the sky is a place where individuals seek refuge, a space onto which we project our wishes and dreams.
Press preview Tuesday, May 23, at 11 a.m. Opening Wednesday, May 24, 7-9 p.m.
MALMÖ KONSTHALL
S:t Johannesgatan 7
Box 17127
SE-200 10 Malmö
T 46 40 34 12 94
M 46 708 34 12 94
F 46 40 30 15 07 www.konsthall.malmo.se