Cosmic Dialogues: Selections from the Latin American Collection May 14–August 23, 2015


Dynamic works from the Museum’s renowned collection of Latin American art focus on visual explorations of space and light in Cosmic Dialogues. This exhibition features nearly 50 significant sculptures and drawings created over the past 70 years, including immersive light installations, rarely seen works on paper, and masterpieces of Kinetic art.

Cosmic Dialogues: Selections from the Latin American Collection allows visitors to engage with Latin American artistic innovators in new and exciting ways. The presentation showcases Modern and Contemporary artists’ concern with the cosmos as a driving theme.

A highlight is the reinstallation of La ciudad hidroespacial (The Hydrospatial City) by Gyula Kosice (born 1924). An audience favorite at the MFAH in 2009, this immersive, room-sized display is Kosice’s utopian vision of space architecture. The Hydrospatial City epitomizes the Argentinean artist’s pioneering use of innovative materials such as Plexiglas and illustrates his fundamental preoccupations with water, space, and the human condition. At a time when few paid attention to the physical depletion of the planet, The Hydrospatial Citybegun in 1946 and completed in 1972—was both a sounding alarm and a poetic manifesto for survival in space.

Kosice’s masterpiece is displayed in dialogue with a selection of light-based structures by other Argentinean artists active in the Kinetic art movement in Europe. Cosmic Dialogues also draws from the Museum’s extensive holdings of masterworks by German-born Venezuelan artist Gego (1912–1994). In the 1960s and 1970s, she developed a structural method for drawing in space with a series of flexible, hanging net sculptures made of stainless-steel wire. Her work contrasts with examples by contemporary artists, such as Argentina's Gustavo Díaz (born 1969) and Mexico's Pablo Vargas Lugo (born 1968), who are concerned with issues of light and space.


This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Location

Audrey Jones Beck Building
5601 Main Street
Houston, TX 77005
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