Jowa Imre Kis-Jovak Designs Exhibit at MAC São Paulo
By Visual Arts News Desk
Broadwayworld.com
U.S. June 8, 2016
Well-known Dutch interior architect/designer Jowa Imre Kis-Jovak of Architectenbureau Jowa in Amsterdam has designed the Oswaldo Vigas exhibition at MAC on view until July 3, 2016. Organized by the Oswaldo Vigas Foundation, the traveling exhibition features sixty-three paintings and six sculptures by the Venezuelan artist (1923-2014) who was a pioneer of Latin American art. The exhibition is curated by Bélgica Rodríguez and the São Paulo exhibition is guest curated by CoBrA Museum Director Katja Weitering.
Spanning 70 years, the retrospective shows the diverse influences on Vigas's work that synthesize pre-Hispanic art and African statues with contemporaneous trends of Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism. After spending significant amounts of time in the 1950s and 1960s in Paris, Vigas returned to Venezuela permanently, indelibly changed by his experiences abroad. The rest of his career is marked by an oscillation between the figurative and abstract and experimentation in different media such as sculpture, tapestries, engravings, and ceramics.
Imre Kis-Jovak, working within the parameters of the long rectangular exhibition space of the MAC designed by architect Oscar Neimeyer, created an exhibition design that is organized around five "cabinets." Each cabinet contains work from a different artistic theme of Vigas' life, de-emphasizing chronology and accentuating his multi-faceted work. The five cabinets are The Human Form, Mythological, Private Life, Constructivism and Mattereological, and Freedom of Matter.
A large, blown-up photograph of Vigas alongside exhibition text welcomes visitors into the thematic rooms. A diagonal wall that features his most representative pieces of each theme divides the cabinets into two triangles.
The central cabinet connects his biography to his studio practice. This portion of the exhibition includes objects from Vigas's art collection as well as an illustrated chronology of the artist's life. The exhibition concludes with a screening room with footage from Vigas's life. Vigas's artwork comes alive alongside still and moving images of him, his belongings, and photographs of his studio.