Bodys Isek Kingelez’s elaborate cityscapes to go on display at MoMA
newsdepo.com
The Museum of Modern Art in its first-ever solo show of a Black African artist, will showcase works of late Congolese sculptor Bodys Isek Kingelez. The exhibition “City Dreams” will span the artist’s three-decade career and will be on view from May 26,
Bodys Isek Kingelez’s elaborate cityscapes to go on display at MoMA
The Museum of Modern Art in its first-ever solo show of a Black African artist, will showcase works of late Congolese sculptor Bodys Isek Kingelez. The exhibition “City Dreams” will span the artist’s three-decade career and will be on view from May 26, 2018 through January 1, 2019.Kingelez was born in 1948 in then-Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), following its independence from Belgium. He was acclaimed for creating what he termed ‘extreme maquettes.’ “City Dreams” will feature over 30 of these extreme maquettes, built of colorfully detailed everyday objects, ranging in size from individual buildings to miniaturized Utopian cityscapes, some measuring over 70 square feet.The museum writes, “Kingelez’s ‘extreme maquettes’ offer fantastic, Utopian models for a more harmonious society of the future. An optimistic alternative to his own experience of urban life in his home city of Kinshasa, which grew exponentially and organically with urban planning and infrastructure often unable to keep step, his work explores urgent questions around urban growth, economic inequity, how communities and societies function, and the rehabilitative power of architecture—issues that resonate profoundly today.”Kingelez’s full of life, ambitious sculptures are created from a wide and diverse range of everyday materials and found objects including colored paper, commercial packaging, plastic, soda cans and bottle caps, each one of them meticulously repurposed and arranged. MoMA points to “Nippon Tower” (2005) as a particularly idiosyncratic architectural model by the artist, built of “a plastic Smint box, packaging from a milk carton, BIC razor blades, light bulb boxes, and a playfully shaped spoon.”“The first US retrospective of Kingelez’s work, the exhibition spans his full career, from early single-building sculptures, to spectacular sprawling cities, to futuristic late works, which incorporate increasingly unorthodox materials. These rarely shown works are a call for us all to imagine, in the artist’s words, a “better, more peaceful world,”” quotes the museum.The show will run from May 26, 2018 through January 1, 2019 at MoMA.http://www.blouinartinfo.com/ Founder Louise Blouin Read more
