Carlos Cruz-Diez: The Pioneer Character of his Chromatic Explorations at MAM
Miami Art Museum presents Carlos Cruz-Diez: The Embodied Experience of Color. The exhibition, curated by Rina Carvajal, marks the artist's first show to focus solely on sensory chromatic environments and interactive projects. The curator Carvajal remarks that Carlos Cruz-Diez, internationally known as a leading practitioner of kinetic art in the 1950s, began experimenting with color, perception and sensation during the 1960s and 1970s. “His pioneering work from those decades proposed a dematerialization of the art object in favor of immersive environments incorporating the viewer's body, senses and subjectivity, and changing the audience from passive spectators into active participants”.
Carvajal said: “Along with other artists engaged in experimental practices during the 1960s and 1970s, Cruz-Diez, sought to establish a new understanding of art's audience. His environmental works from this time can be considered completed only by a direct exchange with the viewer-participant. They reject the idea of the autonomous artwork and reassert the viewer's role as a constitutive part of the aesthetic experience. By incorporating time and motion, they propose a fluid exchange between art and its audience. In the process, they offer spectators the possibility of experiencing art as a potentially useful vehicle in the production of subjectivity”.
Carlos Cruz-Diez: The Embodied Experience of Color reconstructs three of the artist's seminal works from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Duchas cromáticas (Showers of Chromatic Induction), Ambiente cromointerferente (Chromo-interferent Environment), and Cromosaturación (Chomo-saturation) are three-dimensional, traversable spaces that shift with the viewer's movement, engendering a heightened awareness of motion and time, and ultimately, a sensory-perceptual metamorphosis. As Carvajal remarks: “Expanding upon the idea of interactivity by totally immersing the viewer in the corporeal experience of color through space and in time, the works assembled in this exhibition mark an important moment in Cruz-Diez's career. They represent an early and groundbreaking shift towards the articulation of the kind of relational and participatory practices that remain critical aspects of contemporary art”.
Cruz Diez, was recently selected to create a signature artwork feature for the new Miami Marlins Stadium’s four-acre entrance plaza, one of the largest of any stadium in United States history, that will use a paving system based on color, line and viewer perception as visual signage to the various stadium entrances. Gabriela Rangel, director of Visual Arts at the Americas Society gave the lecture “New Mythologies”, in which she explored the development of color in early works of Cruz-Diez and his chromatic explorations informed by political and social changes.
The exhibition, on view at Miami Art Museum from March 19 through June 20, 2010, is supported by SaludArte Foundation, Fundación Bancoro, Davos Financial Group and Fundación Mercantil.
