Alexandre Arrechea "Elasticity"
Magnan Metz Gallery
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Elasticity introduces a new perspective for the artist. Where his previous work explored issues of failure, uncertainty and suspicion, Arrechea now defies those finite senses and creates expressions of continuous movement. Inspired by architectural buildings from his native Cuba, as well as landmark buildings in the U.S., Arrechea began to fuse these familiar structures to the body of a spinning top. The result is a “dancing” city or building in perpetual motion. Elasticity includes two (2) large scale sculptural tops, including the Bacardi Building in Havana that stands approximately 13 feet high. There will also be watercolor drawings of real and imagined buildings.
Taking the adaptation of architecture and movement a step further, Arrechea created a series of rolled-up sky scrapers – as if one could reel these rigid structures in like a hose – transforming monumental buildings into a tool or snail-like shape. Arrechea views this as a direct act of irreverence to the understanding of what verticality in a building means. He has physically reshaped the concept of verticality and monumentality into a new reality: elastic architecture, or city. This concept can also be interpreted as a metaphor to the challenges of adapting to new realities we face every day. Arrechea describes his work as having, “created a sculpture which is a metaphor of the constant changing forms in the evolution of our minds.”
Alexandre Arrechea was born in Trinidad, Cuba and graduated from the prestigious Superior Art Institute of Havana in 1994. From 1994 - 2003 Arrechea was a member of the Cuban collective Los Carpinteros. Arrechea has had much success as a solo artist exhibiting widely in the US and abroad. He currently has a solo exhibition “The Rules of Play” at both SCAD locations (Savannah College of Art and Design) through July 2010 and is part of a two person show “Ideational Architecture”, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdale Park, CA. Most recently, Arrechea had his video “Black Sun” play on the NASDAQ Billboard in Time Square (March 2010) through the Time Square Alliance; he exhibited a large-scale sculpture “Orange Tree” at the Crane Ice Box Project Space in conjunction with Philagrafika 2010; solo exhibition at Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Caja de Burgos, Spain, 2009; special project “The Situation” for the Moscow Biennial 2009; Thessaloniki Biennial of Contemporary Art 2009, Greece and the Havana Bienal 2009 in Cuba.
Media
Schedule
from April 15, 2010 to May 29, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-04-22 from 18:00 to 20:00