Carlos Garaicoa: Unfinished Order / Sylvie Fleury: My Life on the Road

Carlos Garaicoa: Unfinished Order (Orden inconcluso)
The Museum Villa Stuck presents the first comprehensive solo exhibition of Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa in the German-speaking countries. To Garaicoa, the failure of political ideals expresses itself most clearly in architecture. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the artist has been reflecting on the social, economic and political change that is a result of the history of the twentieth century. In his native city of Havana as well as in international projects he traces the transformation of urban space as a reflection of social developments. Architecture and urbanism are the subjects that are his main focus. In photo series and installations he creates a critical archaeology of cities.

Unfinished Order (Orden inconcluso) is the first project dealing with the two contexts that the artist knows from personal experience: on the one hand his home country, Cuba, which is characterised by contradictions between social realities and utopian hopes, and on the other a Southern European country such as Spain with its capital, Madrid, where the end of utopia presents itself from the opposite perspective: that of late-capitalist societies and the idea of social welfare.

Unfinished Order (Orden inconcluso) draws a conceptual line spanning the different decades of Carlos Garaicoa’s oeuvre. Based on a careful selection of works that deal with economy and architecture in terms of power, control and utopian ideas, the exhibition also offers visitors the opportunity to see a few project-specific works that exemplify the artist’s intention to find a connection between the various political and economic realities he has experienced first-hand. Experiences and perspectives of a newly awakening and developing world are juxtaposed with a European disillusioned view of developments that already occurred.

An exhibition of CA2M - Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, in cooperation with Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, Oslo, and Museum Villa Stuck, curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, Director MALBA, Buenos Aires

Sylvie Fleury: My Life on the Road
Faster! Bigger! Better! Since the 1990s Sylvie Fleury has in various ways been referencing commerce and the world of luxury goods in her works. This summer the Museum Villa Stuck is devoting a major one-woman exhibition to her. Fleury will use the historical rooms of the Villa Stuck to offer a survey of her work of the past 25 years. In addition, she is conceiving new works for the exhibition; glass pieces created in collaboration with the Mayer’sche Hofkunstanstalt will be a special highlight.

Sylvie Fleury is known for her stagings of glamour, fashion and luxury items: shopping bags of well-known fashion companies are presented in the exhibition spaces, as are cosmetic products that are lying broken on the floor. Status symbols and fetishes from the world of consumption are transferred into the context of the world of art, thereby calling their value into question. Her objects are “ready-mades” in the tradition of Duchamp that underscore Wahrhol’s approach to a critique of the world of commodities. The power of the brand, the logo as emblem of a global consumer world—Fleury exaggerates these marketing strategies in her multilayered works. She takes works of famous (male) artists, such as the art of Minimalist Dan Flavin or the conceptual works of Daniel Buren, and adds provokingly feminist connotations to them. By disrupting the aesthetic concept of those works, she breaks their seriousness.

For her exhibition at the Museum Villa Stuck Sylvie Fleury will also make reference to Franz von Stuck’s historical rooms. Like no other in his day, Stuck knew how to create a brand: from his own typeface through to the total work of art, as which he conceived his mansion, he was primarily concerned with recognizability and brilliant art product development—a challenge for Fleury’s works. Her installations oscillate between seduction and superficiality, art and advertising, concept and consumption. They reveal desire and expert or insider knowledge as well as social codes.

An exhibition organized by the Museum Villa Stuck, curated by Verena Hein.