Past Projects for the Future

Dallas, TX, JUNE 2016 – Dallas Contemporary announced today details of their fall 2016 exhibitions. The museum will present a trio of solo exhibitions for artists who have had major recognition in other countries and cultural fields but yet to receive dedicated institutional attention in the United States: Laercio Redondo, Pedro Reyes and Bruce Weber. Dallas Contemporary is committed to presenting exhibitions that bring top contemporary art from around the globe to Dallas, often through pioneering exhibitions, as the fall season exemplifies.

LAERCIO REDONDO
One of the foremost contemporary artists in Brazil, Laercio Redondo uses his work to unearth hidden memories. Redondo has exhibited widely in South America and Europe, and Dallas Contemporary is pleased to present his first United States exhibition. Redondo creates installations and multimedia works that emerge from his deep research into cultural dynamics, Brazilian architecture and its practitioners. In this exhibition he examines such important Brazilian figures as Athos Bulcão, Lina Bo Bardi and Lota de Macedo Soares.

Central to the exhibition is a new film installation, Detour, that traverses the distance between Flamengo Park designed by de Macedo Soares, where the main art museum in Rio de Janiero is located, and Casa Samambaia, de Macedo Soares’ private home outside the city, in the hills of Petrópolis. The soundtrack of the film brings attention to the architect’s conspicuous absence from Brazilian collective memory. The piece exemplifies Redondo’s ability to illuminate the implications of collective forgetting – which he positions as both specific to Brazil and universal. Other important historical figures evoked in the exhibition are artist Athos Bulcão, and architect Lina Bo Bardi. Bulcão is highlighted in the video Retoque. In this work a tile mural by Bulcão is translated into a musical score. In a video work titled The Glass House we see documentation of Bo Bardi’s iconic home on two occasions, one in 1999 and the other in 2008. It brings attention to the lived-in nature of the home, in contrast to being seen as an architectural remnant.

Laercio Redondo was born in 1967 in Brazil and is currently based between Rio de Janeiro and Stockholm, Sweden. He received his MFA at Konstfack, University of Art, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden. He has had solo exhibitions internationally in Spain, Germany, and Cuba in addition to Brazil.

The exhibition is curated by Justine Ludwig, Director of Exhibitions and Senior Curator of Dallas Contemporary.