INTERGALACTIC: GYULA KOSICE AT MALBA

Curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez and María Amalia García, the show brings together more than 80 works produced between 1950 and 1980, standing out in the experimental profile of his work-especially in his plastic sculptures, kinetic reliefs, and water drops, most of them with lights and activated by aerators and motors-where movement is a fundamental constant. He also presents, for the first time in Buenos Aires, The Hydrospatial City, an open and processual work whose most representative group, which will be exhibited at Malba, has been part of the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) since 2009. This installation condenses years of material and theoretical research and expresses the wishes of Kosice, who, as early as the 1940s, imagined humanity settled somewhere beyond the Earth.

Mari Carmen Ramirez explains: “The hydrospatial city is initially and fundamentally a sculptural work that evolves into an architectural sketch. Each of the curved and hemispherical plexiglass habitats represents an attempt to touch, expanding it, the notion of 'space' that is transparent, malleable, dynamic and, to a certain extent, dimensional (...) Kosice was fully aware that 'the sculptural' was only a step in the direction of the full achievement of his goal: to use art to forge a new mode of social organization. To achieve this goal, 'the sculptural' had to annul itself”.

Experimental artist, sculptor, poet and theorist, Kosice is one of Argentina's best-known creators. Co-founder of the Rioplatense constructive art groups Arturo (1944) and Madí (1946), he was also a leading figure of the post-1945 international avant-garde.

María Amalia García says: “His pioneering production introduced original artistic proposals, such as mobile and interactive sculpture, represented by the emblematic piece Röyi (1945), and explored a great diversity of materials, many of them groundbreaking. His research into movement dates back to Madí: the group was already experimenting with mobiles, the use of motors and the viewer's action on the work, calling into crisis the categories of sculpture and spectator. Like other artists of his generation, he used light, plastic and movement, and in the late 1950s he was among the first artists to incorporate water into his works.”