COPENHAGEN.- Marta Minujín (b.1943) is an iconic figure and one of the most prominent Latin American pop and conceptual artists ever. She created some of art history’s first spectacular immersive installations, and over the last sixty years she has developed happenings, performances, installations and video works that have influenced generations of contemporary artists in Latin America, the US and Europe. Despite her already long and illustrious career Minujín is still a force to be reckoned with, and when she had her first museum exhibition in New York last year, the New York Times featured her in an article headlined ‘Rocking the Art World at 80’.
Very few artist have, like Minujín, been so far ahead of their time. As early as the 1960s she anticipated today’s social media, creating works that made sophisticated use of coordinated television sets designed to connect people across the planet in real time. Her huge and wild installations from the same period were originally shown in small underground galleries, having only in recent years found their way into art museums. Soon now, she will be on show at CC in a collaboration with a number of prominent European museums.
CC’s director, Marie Laurberg, says: For CC to have succeeded in showing Marta Minujín’s first major exhibition in Europe is nothing short of a scoop. Minujín is a powerhouse and a totally unique voice in the art world. Throughout her life she has been a pioneer and has developed a deeply original artistic oeuvre that is completely contemporary, all part of her quest to ‘intensify life’. Seeing her art should, quite simply, make life feel wilder, bigger and more intense. Minujín is a giant of the art world that European audiences have yet to see. We cannot wait to present her on a large scale.
Gigantic installations re-created especially for the exhibition
The exhibition at CC showcases several of Minujín’s most recent works – as well as connecting back to her entire history. The installation Implosion (2021) excites the senses with an all-encompassing and colourful video and soundscape which allows the viewer to feel both music and colour in their own body. Soft sculptures and collage paintings are covered in Minujín’s iconic neon stripes, and the feminist masterpiece Soft Gallery (1973), consisting of some 150 mattresses, is reimagined in a new version specifically for the CC exhibition. This echoes the construction of one of her absolute masterpieces –the gargantuan labyrinth La Menesunda from 1965. Menesunda means ‘confusion’, and the work is devised as a fanciful journey through Buenos Aires, organised in 11 distinct spaces. Along the way, the audience encounters a neon-lit street smelling of fried chicken, a swamp, a beauty parlour with makeup artists offering the audience their services and a bedroom presenting a newspaper-reading couple in bed.
The exhibition will also showcase a wide selection of archive material that CC has gained exclusive access to through close collaboration with the artist.
Intensify Life is the first exhibition in the Founding Figures series in which, in the next few years, CC will present important artists who have played a pivotal role in the development of contemporary art, putting them on the map of art history for a new generation.
La Menesunda: According to Marta Minjuín is organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, Museo De Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and Marta Minujin Estudio. It will tour to Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark; Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; KANAL – Centre Pompidou, Brussels, Belgium and Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.
