Rationed Water, 2013. Hydrophobic coating, Tempered Glass, Water, Plastic Bottles, Fierce Apple Gatorade, Blueberry-Pomegranate Gatorade, 58 ⅛ x 33 ½ x 20”
Untitled, 2012, acrylic on canvas, ratchet clamp, 63” x 46”. Morgan Richard Murphey
Ebony and Ivory, 2009. Rice pudding and chocolate in toilets. Bert Rodriguez
Photography has born as a scientific reproduction tool of the reality and has been the strongest and the largest medium to construct modern history of the mankind but the statut of the photographic document as lost its authority with reality in its new relation with the digital world. Since photography switch into digital era, the truth we used to attached to this medium has disappeared. There is no more negative to prove chemically and mechanically that an event has really occurred. The change of the nature of photography into an image brought deep distance between the fact itself and its representation.
Without image there is no event and any event could be built with images. Mass Consumption of images has created images to serve specific goal and to be recognized, modifying the production process from « taking » to « making » a picture. The space conquest have been focused all its energy in the construction of an heroic and mythic media exploit. Without any image of the first moon landing on the moon, nobody would have believed it…
Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt), one of the most important artists of the Venezuelan constructivist movement, was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1912 and moved to Venezuela in 1939. During her first decades in Caracas she worked as an architect and designer of furniture, and taught architecture at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas. In the 1950s, Gego became committed to the art of abstraction, and she began experimenting with the conversion of planes into three-dimensional forms through drawing, watercolor, engraving, collage and sculpture. Her interest was to explore architectural space based on the elements of line and movement.
In Gego’s work, the use of the line as a constructive module became one of the most important elements in her art. She believed that the line could express what is not physically present in nature – including thought, intuition and emotion. Her work of the 1960s was made of industrial materials such as steel, wire, lead and nylon to create delicate nets and grid-like forms that play with space, movement and shadow. One of her most significant series from this period is Reticuláreas, made of aluminum and steel that are interwoven nets and webs suspended in space. The two Reticuláreas on view in the exhibition are important examples of her abstract art, which emphasize a focus on endless lines and a repetitive layering of threads to shape space.
Concavo-Convesso, 1946. Bruno Munari
At the end of the 1940s Bruno Munari created a work-environment. In a dark and possibly ‘white cube’-style room, light radiated through a piece of industrial metal mesh, folded according to a mathematical precept: a work Munari entitled Concave-convex. The object, moved only by air currents or the touch of the visitor, created moiré patterns not only within itself but – most importantly for Munari – cast a complex, dynamic and mutable image onto the walls. The object was a two-dimensional square, curved in such a manner as to become three-dimensional, and expanded to infinity through the shadows that were thrown into the surrounding environment, suggesting the notion of the curvature of space. The obvious relationship of this object with the principles of non-Euclidean geometry did not lessen the atmosphere of mystery that permeated the environment, created by a skilful juxtaposition of form and structure, shadow and light.
