SongEun ArtSpace is proud to present an exciting selection of works by the internationally established and recognized artist Carlos Amorales. Although Amorales has previously been invited to and participated in several group showings in Korea, this is the first solo exhibition of his works in the country. In this exhibition titled Carlos Amorales: Silent Films, a collection of drawings, rayograms, and videos as well as a site specific installation are being presented. Carlos Amorales was specifically chosen by SongEun ArtSpace to inaugurate its recently established annual program aimed at providing significant exposure in Korea to young international artists who are making a unique and significant impact in the art world today.
While the works of Amorales are easy to understand visually, the message and concept are perhaps much less so. He once stated in an interview with Hans Michael Herzog: “I am not a writer; I’m not a person who can tell a fantasy story, I’m good at visualizing things. So what I’ve been looking for is a method to be able to tell those stories and to make good my story-telling incompetence.” Like a story writer who would typically arrange a series of characters each with his or her own intricate personalities and appearances, Amorales has created his own archive of images. And for Amorales, the setting for these “characters” resembles an urban gothic world where archaic myths and rural imagination come together in a contemporary form. A truly brilliant and intellectual artist, Amorales has been able to create his own unique system of communication often through “recycling” his images. Though Amorales has participated in numerous exhibitions around the globe, all with different, intricate and complex concepts and designs, the simplicity of his images and the singular physical impact allow the works to wander easily among different mediums.
For Carlos Amorales: Silent Films, the artist explores photograms (also known as rayograms) for the first time. Photograms are photographic images made without a camera, a process used famously by Man Ray. To make these images, Amorales places objects and shadows directly over the surface of a photo-sensitive material, such as photographic paper, and then exposes it to light. The result is a negative shadow image that varies in tone depending on the transparency of the objects used. Throughout Amorales’ oeuvre, the imagery of birds and the human body are common. These themes also carry through to this current photogram project, as the artist continues his study of the “manimal” (man/animal) side of humans. The collection of drawings that are also presented has much of the same imagery though obviously through a different medium and presentation.
In order to plan for the installation in this exhibition, Amorales, who lives and works in Mexico, travelled to Seoul for a short 24 hour period prior to the opening to experience the actual space. During this trip, he was inspired by the Korean language which he could not understand and which reminded him of his experience of reading and listening to music (another language he can not read). This sparked in him the idea of having “graffiti music”. Amorales thus created a series of musical scores which have been sprayed directly onto the walls and will be sung by several performers during the exhibition period. The idea here being that the singing of music will be the common “language” that all can understand. Next to this musical piece, two films are projected, “Herramientes de Trabajo” – “Work Tools”- and “Discarded Spider”. Both videos are silent black and white films and Amorales purposefully plays with the musicality of the score in the installation and the contrasting silence of the films.
No matter in which country Amorales is exhibiting, there is a continuation of his broader story telling through the interaction that takes place with the viewers who encounter an unusual, yet compelling visual literature.
About the Artist
Carlos Amorales (b. 1970) is a painter, sculptor and performance artist living and working in Mexico City. Amorales has had numerous solo exhibitions at leading international venues such as the Daros Collection, Zurich; the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires; the Contemporary Center for the Arts, Cincinnati, Ohio; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte, Mexico City; and the Kunsthalle Fredericianum, Kassel, Germany. He has participated in several group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennial (2003), the Berlin Biennial (2001), the Havana Biennial (2009), and Amorales has presented performances at Tate Modern (2003), Centre Georges Pompidou (2001), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMa) (2003) and the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City (2007).
Amorales’ work is included in many of the most visionary public and private collections throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; La Colección Jumex, Mexico City; the Margulies Collection, Miami; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
