Carlos Cruz-Diez:
The Embodied Experience of Color
March 19 – June 20, 2010
101 West Flagler St.
Miami, Fl. 33130, USA
Internationally known as a leading practitioner of kinetic art in the 1950s, Carlos Cruz-Diez 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.
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, 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. 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.
The exhibition is curated by MAM adjunct curator Rina Carvajal and organized by Miami Art Museum. It is supported by SaludArte Foundation, Fundación Bancoro, Davos Financial Group and Fundación Mercantil.
The following works are included in the exhibition:
Duchas de inducción cromática (Chromatic Induction Showers), 1968/2010, Cromosaturación (Chromosaturation), 1965/2010, Ambiente cromointerferente (Chromo-interference Environment), 1974/2009 and Experiencia cromática aleatoria interactive (Interactive Aleatory Chromatic Experience), 1995/2010
Opening
The exhibition is open to the public from March 19 through June 20, 2010.
Further Information
Media Contact: Tracy Belcher/ 305.375.1705/ TBelcher@miamiartmuseum.org.
