Maria Elena González

Maria Elena González uses simple geometric forms and industrial materials to create sculptures, installations, and outdoor architectural interventions. “My interests with the tactility of sculpture and the primacy of form, the allure of materials and craft, and recombining materials and ideas, are of a primary nature to me,” she says. González subjects architectural symbols, blueprints, and other techniques of coding physical spaces to a minimalist vocabulary, exploring themes of poverty, death, and memorialization. She received widespread recognition for her site-specific outdoor sculpture Magic Carpet/Home (1999), for which she replicated the floor plan of a six-room public housing unit on a “magic” carpet installed in a nearby park, subverting the constrictive nature of the unit into an open site for play.