Jac Leirner, Miami Art Museum - Adhesive 44

Jac Leirner — Adhesive 44
Miami Art Museum
July 16 – October 10, 2004

Miami Art Museum presents the work of São Paulo-based artist JAC LEIRNER in her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. in over a decade. Jac Leirner creates sophisticated abstractions out of mundane objects. She collects what most of us usually throw away—cigarette packs, airline tickets, envelopes, brochures, museum store shopping bags—and turns them into graceful objects. Jac Leirner has created a new piece for MAM entitled Adhesive 44, her 44th sticker-based work and the largest to date.

Jac Leirner — Adhesive 44 is organized by Miami Art Museum and curated by MAM Associate Curator Cheryl Hartup as part of its New Work series of projects by leading contemporary artists.

Adhesive 44 consists of window panes arranged in two 40-foot-long rows and covered with stickers.  Jac Leirner has been collecting stickers for 20 years and draws on her vast personal collection for this exhibition. The windows are of the domestic type found at hardware stores and this is the first time Jac Leirner has used them in her work. Previously, Jac Leirner applied stickers to free-standing bus windows and colored sheets of Plexiglas.

The stickers in Adhesive 44 are divided into categories based on color, subject, material, and form. They are mostly promotional in nature, advertising museums, art fairs, hotels, airlines, and punk rock bands, among others. Adhesive 44 also includes stickers made for children and stickers affixed to crates that transport art. Jac Leirner works with mass-produced stickers such as mailing labels, as well as stickers for one-time only events, and highly specialized stickers with beautiful designs, which she refers to as “small jewels.” Such a “jewel” might comprise the outstanding element in one of her compositions. The artist purchases some stickers, most in the course of her worldwide travels. She also receives many as gifts. Since each sticker has its own history, Jac Leirner’s work is a record of her personal experiences and encounters. Her work also reflects her abiding interest in visual design and the ways commerce and culture interact. The formal rigor of her arrangements gives these random, everyday found objects a sense of ordered beauty.

Adhesive 44 is a harmonious whole comprised of enormously varied parts. The work is at once painting-like and sculptural, and it vividly demonstrates how stylized, mass-disseminated systems of information can be made to seem extraordinary and unique.

Jac Leirner grew up in São Paulo surrounded by her parents' important collection of Brazilian art from the 1950s and 60s, which influenced her ways of thinking and seeing. She arranges shape and color with formal rigor and clarity much like the highly rational geometric abstractions created in Brazil in the 1950s. A decade later, in the 1960s, Brazilian artists strove to break down barriers between art and everyday life and Jac Leirner's choice of materials reflects a similar sensibility.

Jac Leirner also sees her work connected to the generation of artists in Brazil that preceded her own, which includes Cildo Meireles, Tunga, Waltércio Caldas, and José Resende. Her works convey the physicality and sense of refinement found in the works of this generation from the 1970s.

“Jac Leirner is one of the most important artists of her generation working in Brazil today,” notes Cheryl Hartup. “Like Cildo Meireles, whose work was exhibited at MAM last year, Jac Leirner is a pivotal figure in the history of Brazilian art, and Miami Art Museum is delighted to present her work to a wider audience in South Florida.”

JACQUELINE LEIRNER was born in São Paulo in 1961. She studied at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo from 1979 to 1984 and taught there from 1987 to 1989. Jac Leirner’s work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro (2002); Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2001, 1998); Sala Mendoza, Caracas (1998); The Bohen Foundation, New York (1998); Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva (1993); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (1992); and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1991). Jac Leirner's work has been included in the Venice Biennale (1997, 1990), Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany (1992), and the São Paulo Bienal (1994, 1989, 1983). In 1991 she was a visiting fellow at University College in Oxford, England, and an artist in residence at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she had solo exhibitions. In 2001 she received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in New York. Jac Leirner lives and works in São Paulo.

About the Curator: CHERYL HARTUP is Associate Curator at Miami Art Museum. Before joining MAM in September 2000, Ms. Hartup served as the McDermott Curatorial Assistant at the Dallas Museum of Art from 1998-2000. Among the exhibitions she has organized for MAM are Light and Atmosphere (2004); Visual Poetics: Art and the Word (2003); New Work: Cildo Meireles (2003); and New Work: Odili Donald Odita (2002). She is currently working on the upcoming exhibitions Fabian Marcaccio and Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s–70s. Ms. Hartup received a M.A. in Latin American Studies and Museum Studies from New York University and a M.A. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin.

MIAMI ART MUSEUM
101 West Flagler Street, Miami, FL 33130
www.miamiartmuseum.org

Cildo Meireles, Miami Art Museum

Cildo Meireles
Miami Art Museum
July 18 - October 26, 2003

Miami Art Museum (MAM) presents an exhibition by Brazilian artist CILDO MEIRELES. For MAM's New Work series, Cildo Meireles is installing Strictu, a room-size environment being shown for the first time in the United States. Curated by MAM Associate Curator, Cheryl Hartup, Cildo Meirele's project explores relationships of power, control and other aspects of authoritarianism, an ongoing theme in the artist's work. The installation occupies the entire gallery, creating a walk-through space formed by chains on the floor, ending at a brightly lit table with two chairs.

"Cildo Meireles is one of the most original artists at work today. Even though he is internationally known, his installations are rarely seen in the United States. We are delighted to present his work to a wider audience in Miami," said MAM Director, Suzanne Delehanty.

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948, Cildo Meireles is one of Brazil's most significant living artists. Cildo Meireles embarked on his career in the 1960's and became part of an avant-garde that set a new agenda for Brazilian art. Cildo Meireles is known for dramatic, multi-sensory environments that intimately involve the viewer. The idea for Strictu, came to Cildo Meireles while visiting New York City in 1999. In his hotel room, Cildo Meireles turned on the television and saw a program about racial conflicts in the United States during the 1960s. He watched as a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan said, "We want to steal their time. We want to steal their space. We want to steal their minds." This statement of intent left a deep impression on the artist and became the impetus for Strictu. The words of the Grand Wizard are displayed on the wooden table in the exhibition at MAM.

During the 1960s and 70s Cildo Meireles responded to Brazil's repressive military regime and to the brutal authoritarianism of the time by challenging established ideas about art. Like the work of his predecessors, two of Brazil's most famous artists -- Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark -- Cildo Meireles often makes his work participatory, addressing socio-political and cultural concerns. The suggestion of danger and denial of freedom are recurring motifs Cildo Meireles' projects.

In one of Cildo Meireles' installation, shown in the late 80s, visitors had to cross a floor covered with broken glass in order to navigate a labyrinth of barriers. In 1994, he created an installation consisting of a dark, L-shaped room with a foot of talcum powder on the floor and a single lit candle around its turn, the smell of gas permeating the space. Cildo Meireles uses surprise and contradiction to perplex the viewer by playing with expectations and common understandings.

For nearly 40 years, Cildo Meireles has created drawings, paintings, objects, performances and installations that explore the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. He is known for working with mundane materials like money, bones, chalk, charcoal, clocks and rulers. With these humble materials, he creates seductive environments that convey powerful socio-political statements and ideas about perception, time, and space.

Cildo Meireles' work has been seen at Miami Art Museum in three previous group exhibitions: Dream Collection Gifts and just a few Hidden Desires in 1997, Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s in 2000 and Re/Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing in 1998. Cildo Meireles has participated in biennials in São Paulo, Brazil, Johannesburg, South Africa, Sidney, Australia, Venice, Italy, and Kwangju, South Korea, in addition to the international art exhibition Documenta IX (1992) and XI (2002) in Kassel, Germany.

MIAMI ART MUSEUM
101 West Flagler Street, Miami, FL 33130
www.miamiartmuseum.org