For his fifth solo exhibition at Max Protetch, Manglano-Ovalle presents a major new sculpture. Inspired by the materials and design of Mies van der Rohe's unbuilt House with Four Columns (or 50x50 House, 1951), the sculpture functions as a working fish tank. Both elegant and menacing, the work de... Read more
For his fifth solo exhibition at Max Protetch, Manglano-Ovalle presents a major new sculpture. Inspired by the materials and design of Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt House with Four Columns (or 50×50 House, 1951), the sculpture functions as a working fish tank. Both elegant and menacing, the work demonstrates the artist’s continuing interest in producing objects whose physical intensity is capable of posing probing critical questions about the times in which we live.
The fish tank will be filled with Blind Mexican Cave Fish; these fish are indeed blind and make their way via smell and touch. The object itself is profoundly transparent, but because it has been installed below eye level, and its inhabitants are blind fish, it inverts the notion of transparency, calling into question what true visibility looks like. In order to look inside the tank, a viewer would have to prostrate himself, offering a gesture of submission in exchange for verification of the seemingly transparent scene inside.
By using House with Four Columns as a starting point for both this exhibition and the one at MASS MoCA, Manglano-Ovalle mines this canonical Modernist design for its array of philosophical, sociological, art historical, and even ecological references. Though it was never built, the House with Four Columns functions as the architectural equivalent of an empty vessel, a repository for formal and conceptual ideas about shelter, enclosure, and transparency. It represents a modern, glass-and-steel version of the simplest of dwellings: the cave.
For more information about Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Happiness is a state of inertia, and MASS MoCA, read the complete press release on the Max Protetch web site. Background information on the artist can also be found in the PBS documentary Art:
