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Email PageConcentration Camp
November 17, 2006- January 10, 2007
Reception: November 17, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Ivan Navarro
Roebling Hall
606 W 26th StRoebling Hall is pleased to present its second solo exhibition by Ivan Navarro. Titled, “Concentration Camp,” Navarro’s luminescent light based sculptures work in contrast to their darker themes of control and fear. Using lighting and industrial materials, Navarro builds pieces that tell a story both visually and politically.
In the current installation Navarro uses his characteristic fluorescent and neon sculptures to order the gallery into three major parts, all of which reflect different aspects of power and its effects. The first work in the gallery, an enveloping drawing in light, snakes around the gallery vestibule and hallways like a glowing frieze, describing a train of dominant and subservient figures. The gallery’s main space is entirely darkened, excepting for the light emitted by four black light neon sculptures, which describe alternately, a chandelier, a basketball hoop, and two chairs of high design. Illustrating the breadth of Navarro’s practice, the exhibition’s final work, “Flashlight,” introduces yet another aspect of this artist’s work: video, along with a sculpture on wheels, which together relate a tale of transience and loss.
“Navarro’s dazzling sculptural forms suggest utopian longings of Modernist design. But his electrified objects also hint at elements of a bad dream or instruments of torture, as their seductively glowing light surges with undercurrents of darkness.”*
Ivan Navarro has exhibited his work throughout Europe and the U.S. in, among other venues, the Whitney Museum, Witte de With-Rotterdam, Project Space 176-London, the Busan Biennale in Korea, and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporaneo (Spain). “Artificial Light,” opened this Fall at the VCUarts Anderson Gallery in conjunction with Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Goldman Warehouse in Miami, from December 7, 2006, thru February 18, 2007, and the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington DC, from September 19 through January 11, 2007.
*From “Artificial Light,” by John B. Ravenal, Curator, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, September 2006.
Art Reviews of Concentration Camp
| New York Times January 5, 2007 | Roberta Smith | "Iván Navarro’s black-light neon sculptures are on the gimmicky side; never mind their supposed concern with power and torture and, thus, the background of this Chilean-born, New York-based artist. In an uncomfortably dark gallery, this show includes actual-size outlines of Marcel Breuer’s classic Wassily chair and Gerrit Rietveld’s Z chair, as well as a basketball hoop. Mr. Navarro is also known for sculptures quoting well-known Modernist furniture, using fluorescent tubes. The fluorescent works are more engaging because the translation is more awkward, as suggested by a wheelbarrow made of purple-colored fluorescent tubes. But the real draw of this show is a melancholic music video that shows the wheelbarrow in action...." |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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