calendario eventi  :: 

X

5/5/2010

Maria Nepomuceno - Stephen Willats

Victoria Miro 14, London

Maria Nepomuceno

Maria Nepomuceno's woven and beaded sculptures feel entirely self-sufficient. They're at once charming and mysterious, relaxed and vivacious, like the never-entirely-gentle Rio environment that produced them.
Holland Cotter, The New York Times

Victoria Miro is delighted to announce an exhibition of work by emerging Brazilian artist Maria Nepomuceno. Having recently opened an acclaimed solo exhibition at Magasin 3 in Stockholm - her first museum show in Europe - this will be the artist's first solo exhibition in the UK. Maria Nepomuceno's seductive sculptures and installations made of brightly coloured rope, straw and beads spread throughout the spaces they inhabit: they varyingly hang in hammock-like forms, drape down walls, sprawl across floors, or group together as constellations in a new and curious cosmos.

Maria Nepomuceno allows her materials to obey their own organisational logic, weaving them together in a process that presents seemingly infinite possibilities for the spiraling, circling and multiplying of forms. Inspired by ancient traditions and complex indigenous craft techniques, Nepomuceno pushes these into a wholly contemporary engagement with space and structure, form and concept. That the sculptures appear anthropomorphic and organic is essential to a reading of her work: the spiraling central to her process relates to the spirals occurring naturally throughout the universe, giving shape to entire galaxies as well as the blueprint for existence, DNA.

The sculptures bear a direct relationship to the human body, at times seeming familiar and almost functional, as though they are to be utilized for some as yet unlearned task, and at others appearing entirely alien, like unidentified microbes occupying new anatomical terrain. Nepomuceno's work draws on the modern history of Brazilian art and has a particular affinity with the ideas of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, who established parallels between their own aesthetic systems and those of the real world, worked with everyday materials, and maintained that art must be subjective and vital.

Maria Nepomuceno is one of a young generation of Brazilian artists championed by A Gentil Carioca, the dynamic downtown Rio de Janeiro gallery founded by artists Marcio Botner, Laura Lima and Ernesto Neto.

Biographical details:
Born in 1976 in Rio de Janeiro, Maria Nepomuceno studied painting and drawing at the prestigious Parque Lage visual arts school before studying industrial design at the University of Rio de Janeiro and art and philosophy at the School of Visual Arts in Rio de Janeiro.

....................................

Stephen Willats
THE WORLD AS IT IS AND THE WORLD AS IT COULD BE

From the 1960's until today, London-based conceptual artist Stephen Willats has concentrated on ideas that today are ever-present in contemporary art: communication, social engagement, active spectatorship, and self-organization. Stephen Willats has situated his pioneering practice at the intersection between art and other disciplines such as sociology, cybernetics, systems research, learning theory, communications theory and computer technology.

Victoria Miro is delighted to present new and unseen works by Stephen Willats in THE WORLD AS IT IS AND THE WORLD AS IT COULD BE. This exhibition furthers Willats' interrogation of social interactions and the polemics of contemporary life in urban society.

Through his ongoing preoccupation with developing a new graphic language that establishes continuity between film, photography, text and drawings, here Willats takes the idea of a journey through two parallel realities, the world as it is - the world we live in - and its transformation into the world as it could be. Via this strategy, Willats explores the idea of art as something that motivates people to change their perceptions of reality, to embrace the notion that the world in which they live could be quite different, that one can effect change.

The exhibition features a large new installation Cybernetic Still Life (2010), comprised of a monumental wall drawing that incorporates film projections, as well as several photographic and text based works. Employing a diagrammatic framework to express fluidity and transience in relationships - concepts that define the locus of production and exchange of information - these new works explore the very human side of perceptions, our relationships to each other and our tendency to stereotype and make instant assumptions based on brief glimpses into the lives of others.

Cybernetic Still Life takes as its starting point the world of objects and structures in which social activity takes place. The wall drawing appears almost as a sci-fi cityscape, depicting two simplified high-rise residential towers and several seemingly outlandishly-shaped buildings. The odd forms of these structures, however, are derived from designs of modernist vases and other small domestic objects, greatly enlarged in scale. The structures are connected by arrows that represent directions of communication, and incorporate two looped film projections, one depicting people endlessly walking towards the camera, and the other a filmed sequence of ceramic objects. The installation describes relationships between the designed spaces in which we live, the designed objects we surround ourselves with, and our interaction between these two.

In Starting Afresh With A Blank Canvas (2009), poverty and poor social housing are addressed. This photographic work serves as a kind of portrait of a single mother living in a suburban estate, and looks specifically at how she transformed her life and her surrounding environment by acting as a catalyst within her community. In contrast, in The Secret To Life In The City (2010), city bankers - the archetype of moral decline in modern society - are depicted in pairs, accompanied by pictograms illustrating scenarios for communication between them.

Importantly, Willats represents particular individual relations in a generalized form, affirming that it is useful to consider social situations on both a universal and a personal level. Observations of the macro- and micro-scale, of the generic and the specific, and of engagement and distance in Willats' work serve to problematise and present various points of entry into contemporary social relationships.

Press enquiries:
Kathy Stephenson
kathy@victoria-miro.com

Image: Maria Nepomuceno

Private View, Thursday 6 May 20106- 8pm

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW
Open Tuesday to Saturday
10am to 6pm, admission free
Underground Old Street / Angel

stampa

permanent link