Cranbrook Art Museum - Exhibitions - Inigo Maglano-Ovalle

This new exhibition of work by Chicago-based artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's centers around the presentation of three recent video installations that feature the iconic architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as sites for a variety of seemingly mundane activities and scenarios that function as powerful social and political metaphors. In these visually lush works, Mies' landmark Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartment Buildings in Chicago and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin serve as seductive settings and provocative subjects in Manglano-Ovalle's explorations of representation, social and geographic boundaries, and global politics. Like a number of his contemporaries--such as Jorge Pardo, Kevin Appel, Tobias Rehberger and Martin Boyce, whose works engage the visual vocabulary of high modernist design and architecture--Manglano-Ovalle moves beyond homage to recuperate the iconic reductive forms of Mies van der Rohe's modernist architecture as a means of examining its theoretical aspirations and practical failings, and redirecting its abandoned utopian ideals to contemporary social and political concerns. These new large-scale video works--Le Basier/The Kiss (1999), Climate (2000) and Alltagszeit (2001)--represent a long-term investigation by Manglano-Ovalle of the spatial qualities, conceptual foundation, and metaphoric potential of Mies van der Rohe's architecture. Manglano-Ovalle's own ambivalent and conflicted position towards modernism is played-out in these works as they deftly negotiate the lines between homage and critique. Through each new engagement with Mies's architecture, Manglano-Ovalle explores the visual and social language of the International Style while expanding on ongoing themes that have been at the center of his social, political and aesthetic inquiry. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Curator of Exhibitions, Irene Hofmann.

This catalogue is available now from The Store	Exhibition Catalogue - "Inigo Manglano-Ovalle" $ 25.00 This exhibition catalog explores a new body of work by Chicago - based artist Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, recipient of a 2001 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In these new large - scale installations, Manglano-Ovalle engages the iconic modernist architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as sites for a variety of filmed scenarios that function as provocative social and political metaphors. Contributions include essays by exhibition curator Irene Hofman and art historian Anna Novakov, and an artist interview conducted by Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art Director, Michael Rush. The exhibition was in view at Cranbrook Art Museum September 15 through November 25, 2001. Additional venues are the Rose Art Museum - Brandeis University, the Orange County Museum of Artin Newport Beach California, The Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art and the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Fort Worth, Florida.