Lydia Okumura: Volume ’84

Lydia Okumura,Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

Volume ’84 is a solo installation by the Brazilian- Japanese, New York-based Minimalist sculptor and conceptual artist Lydia Okumura, whose work broke the artistic boundaries of the 1970s, expanding the tradition of the Brazilian geometric avant-garde with her multi-dimensional abstract environments.

The five seminal site-specific installations on view in Ropac’s Ely Room gallery, which were originally realised for her major solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo in 1984, highlight a watershed moment in Okumura’s career. Exemplifying the artist’s sustained investigation into spatial possibilities and volume, Okumura’s geometric steel mesh cubes – also shown in the artist’s 2016-2018 touring US retrospective – and White Volume, a three-dimensional floor installation constructed from fabric and wire, will be newly realised. Following Ropac’s first presentation of Okumura’s work in its group exhibition, Land of Lads, Land of Lashes in June 2018, Volume ’84 offers visitors an opportunity to re-evaluate the complex multi-dimensionality of five key sculptures from a pivotal year in her artistic trajectory.

For almost fifty years, Lydia Okumura has transformed space through geometric abstraction, her work blurring the boundaries between illusion and reality and provoking a reassessment of the conventional art-object experience. She was the first Brazilian artist to have their work included in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in the 1970s. Her large-scale often site-specific geometric compositions, largely realised using acrylic paint, cotton string, painted aluminium sheets, fabric and wire, actively challenge our perception of the spatial world. Projected into three-dimensional space from walls and floors, they investigate the optical interplay between two- and three-dimensional forms.

Duration 28 January 2019 - 23 March 2019
Times
Cost
Venue Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
Address Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, W1S 4NJ
Contact 4402038138400 / polly.gaer@ropac.net / www.ropac.net

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