DaWire

It’s interesting to read an in-depth conversation with an artist that really gets to the core of their practice and the choices that lead to their relevance in art history. Entertaining and informative, Jac Leirner in Conversation with Adele Nelson describes Leirner’s personal background, process and work. Born to a family of collectors, Brazilian-born Leirner was one of the first contemporary artists from Latin America whose work was acquired by the MoMA.[...]

This past May the Fundación Juan March in Madrid closed the survey exhibition Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America (1934-1973). The exhibition gathered over 300 works by more than 60 artists, taking as a point of departure two very specific return trips from Europe that offered a chronological structure to the show; Joaquín Torres-García’s return to Uruguay in 1934, and Jesús Rafael Soto’s return to Venezuela in 1973. The exhibition’s strength lies in showcasing in an European institution a comprehensive visual tracing of the complex histories of geometric abstraction in Latin America; a legacy grounded on the aesthetic language of the European constructivist project which, renewed and transformed, thrived throughout Latin America well into the 1960s and 1970s. The title of the show, Cold America, alludes to the tradition’s rational and objective forms which revealed chromatic structures and experiments in a diverse array of mediums such as painting, sculpture, photography and architecture.[...]

Adaptive Actions is a collaborative project initiated in London in 2007 by Montreal based artist Jean-François Prost, gathering a series of micro-actions developed by artists and citizens around the world within an urban city context. The project is based on an open-call available to everyone online. When submitting, each collaborator becomes an ‘actor’ in a series of world-wide micro scenarios and interventions that document and reveal the different ways people adapt to the urban environment, be it improvised or completely planned.[...]

DaWire is proud to present a sneak peek of the book Carlos Cruz-Diez in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez, the first of a series of conversations published by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC). DaWire will be receiving advance copies of the books and covering the entire series for our readers.

The CPPC, founded by avid collector of Latin American art Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, has been subsidizing projects that offer increased visibility and prominence for Latin American artists. As a part of their educational and cultural mission, they have embarked upon the continuation of a project entitled Conversaciones, a series of bilingual (Spanish / English) books that feature conversations between Latin American artists, curators, critics and art historians that underscore the importance of the artist’s voice in scholarly discourse about modern and contemporary art.[...]

Painting for a Specific Floor is a collaborative work that explores the ideas of horizontality and fluidity, as well as surfaces and topography. The work defies the preconception of the work of art as an object meant solely to be looked at. It also challenges the supremacy of the visual sense over other senses, betting on a direct experience with the work; an encounter between the spectator and the work, the piece and the place it inhabits.[...]