Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
26/01/2003 - 23/03/2003
The Orange County Museum of Art
850 San Clemente Drive
Newport Beach, California 92660
Information: (949) 759-1122
Press Office: (949) 759-1122 ext. 207
Photo:
La Baiser/The Kiss, 1999, video still. Courtesy Max Protetch
Gallery, New York.
The Orange County Museum of Art is pleased to announce a solo exhibition
of recent video installations by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. Over the last
decade Manglano-Ovalle has emerged as one of his generation’s most
compelling, socially engaged, and celebrated artists as he has created a
body of work that has challenged social arrangements, investigated
global
politics, and explored ethnic identity.
This exhibition brings together three of Manglano-Ovalle’s video
installations: The Kiss/Le Baiser (1999), Climate (2000),
and Alltagszeit
(In Ordinary Time) (2001). These works feature the iconic modernist
architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as the site for a variety of
everyday activities and scenarios that function as powerful social and
political metaphors. Each of these three visually lush works was filmed
in
one of Mies’s landmark buildings: the Farnsworth House in Plano,
Illinois,
for The Kiss; the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago
for
Climate; and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin for
Alltagszeit. In these
works Mies’s iconic architecture becomes both a provocative
subject and a
seductive site for exploring questions of cultural identity, social
boundaries, and global politics. These works contrast Mies’s
utopian
architectural ideals with the reality of contemporary social and
political
concerns.
In addition to these three video installations, OCMA’s exhibition
includes
a new sculpture by Manglano-Ovalle that represents his largest and most
ambitious work in the medium to date. This new work is a large-scale
fiberglass and titanium sculpture of a cloud whose form is based on a
cumulo-nimbus (or supercell) thundercloud modeled by the Department of
Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois. Working with
architect
Douglas Garofalo, Manglano-Ovalle converted the numerical data scanned
from an existing thirty-kilometer-wide thundercloud and then scaled it
down to be digitally sculpted by computer-controlled milling machines
used
by the automobile industry to prototype new car forms. Here, as in a
number of Manglano-Ovalle’s earlier works, such as the video
installation
Climate, ephemeral forces such as weather and clouds—which
recognize
neither borders nor ideologies—become metaphors for global
politics. More
than sixteen feet wide and suspended just a few inches off the gallery
floor, Manglano-Ovalle’s harnessed and shimmering cloud looms in
the
gallery space, evoking a chilling mushroom cloud or a work of
contemporary
architecture as much as it does the meteorological event that determined
its striking three-dimensional form.
Exhibition catalogue available by calling (714) 662-3366.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle was organized by Cranbrook Art Museum,
Bloomfield
Hills, Michigan, and curated by Irene Hofmann, curator of contemporary
art, Orange County Museum of Art. Following the Orange County Museum of
Art’s presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Palm Beach
Institute
for Contemporary Art in Lake Worth, Florida. Special thanks to Knoll for
providing Mies van der Rohe furniture for the exhibition.
The Orange County Museum of Art’s presentation of this exhibition is
made
possible by Jean and Tim Weiss, Joan and Don Beall, Patricia and Max
Ellis, the Tappan Foundation, U.S. Trust, Delta Airlines and
Visionaries.
Special thanks to Bauer and Wiley Architects, Newport Beach, and RW
Lewis
Builders, Newport Beach, for their in-kind support.