Angel Orensanz: Weightlessness

Opening: January 12, at 7 pm

Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents a solo show of famous sculptor Angel Orensanz – a dreamer, a traveler, a master of various kinds of art. “Weightlessness” reveals the art of Angel Orensenz in all its diversity: graphic works, colorful spacial installations, video works, performances.

Angel Orensanz was born in Spain, in the province of Aragon. During his 40-year career, he has tried various artistic genres and media – from small-scale drawings and paintings to monumental abstract sculptures and conceptual performances. Orensanz works with many materials, including glass, metal, ceramics, colored plastic, and others. Each of his works is documented in photography and video. His pieces are always site-specific, be it natural landscapes or city public spaces. Many of his creations ironically explore social and geopolitical conditions of today’s globalized world.

Orensanz is internationally renowned, especially in Europe and the USA. His shows and performances were presented in dozens of countries; he is a regular participant of the Venice Biennale. The works by Angel Orensanz are known in Russia, too. In 2003, Orensanz together with Mikhail Shemyakin delivered a performance at the Palace Square in St. Petersburg, within the framework of the city’s 300-year jubilee. In 2006, Orensanz’s personal exhibition was hosted by the Marble Palace of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. The Moscow audience saw his pieces in 2004, when they were on view at the State Pushkin Museum. “Weightlessness” was forerun by the performance of Yale University Capella in August 2008, during which a documentary about the art of Angel Orensanz was demonstrated.

“Weightlessness” aims at creating the oneiric universe in which all presented work create a visual harmony among themselves in a seamless dialogue with their surrounding environment. The goal of the artist was to create, from various materials and elements, an organic body by exposing their overlapping layers and challenging their interconnections. This immersive approach is an intricate part of the artistic language of sculptor Angel Orensanz that manifests in his sculpture, painting and film work.

The exhibition consists of four parts (drawings, actions, sculpture installation, video) and shows different areas of Angel Orensanz’s creative activity and intense presence with art actions all over in the world.

Drawings are a key component of his body of work. They include four large size narratives corresponding to a long series made in New York in the early 1990s and four of them created in Regensburg (Germany) in 2000. The video section consists of three videos: "The Final Score", "Poetics of Speed" and "River Flow".

The third section of installation and sculpture includes several fabric constructs, a follow-up iteration in a continuity with the series of installations developed in Palermo (Sicily) under the curatorship of Professor Achille Bonito Oliva, along with a series of fabric construction in the exterior space of the museum in Italy. Angel Orensanz pays special attention to symbolic dates, which he reflects in his works. Having learnt about the “Old New Year”, a holiday widely celebrated in Russia, he decided to bring a “Christmas tree” to Moscow – an installation specially designed for the show at the Moscow Museum of Modern art.

A colorful catalogue will be presented at the exhibition opening. The texts in the catalogue are written by Dr. Alexander Borovski, Director of the Contemporary Art Department of the State Russian Museum of St. Petersburg, an expert on the work of Angel Orensanz as well as Dr. Alexander Levitsky, Professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and Derek Bently, a New York art critic who traces the connection and involvement of Angel Orensanz in the art scene in Russia from the mid 1980s until today.

Angel Orensanz: Weightlessness