MIAMI, FL.- This fall, Miami Art Museum will present Carlos Bunga: Metamorphosis,the Portuguese artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Bunga, whose large-scale structures explore the continuous mutation of architecture and urban space, will create two site-specific installations at MAM. The exhibition will be on view from November 20, 2009 to February 28, 2010.

Carlos Bunga: Metamorphosis will feature two handmade, large-scale structures made out of cardboard and packing tape. Bunga (born Portugal, 1976) utilizes these materials to suggest impermanence, crisis, and decay. His constructions, which sometimes recall makeshift shelters, arise from a dialogue with the existing architecture of the sites where they are built.

The structures employ the motif of the metabolic processes that sustain living organisms as a metaphor for the continuous, organic mutation of urban environments. After carefully building his structures over a period of weeks, the artist submits them to a radical transformation. In a final, cathartic, and performative act, he tears and slices the walls of his constructions, making them implode and revealing additional layers that lie buried within their interiors waiting to be discovered, like hidden traces of memory.

“With a particular interest in the connection between the pictorial and the architectural, Carlos Bunga investigates urban space and the transitory nature of architectural structures,” said Rina Carvajal, adjunct curator at Miami Art Museum and curator of the exhibition. “Behind his psychologically and politically charged environments lie urgent and timely issues related to demographics, immigration, socio-economic disparity and the fragility of contemporary city life.”

Carlos Bunga was born in Porto, Portugal in 1976. After studying Fine Arts at the Escola Superior de Arte e Design in Caldas da Rainha in Portugal, Bunga first attracted international attention with his work at the contemporary art biennial Manifesta 5 (San Sebastian, 2004). Since then, he has been awarded a visual arts grant by the Fundación Marcelino Botín (Spain, 2006) and has had solo shows of his work at MARCO, Museum of Contemporary Art, Vigo ( Heterotopias, 2009), Milton Keynes Gallery (UK, 2006) and Culturgest (Portugal, 2005); and group exhibitions at Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw Under Construction, Poland, 2009), Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona (Time as Matter, MACBA Collection, 2009), Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, IVAM (Construir, habitar, pensar, Valencia, 2008); New Museum, New York (Unmonumental: The Object in the 21s Century, 2007), Justus Lipsius Building (Mobility at Work, Brussels, 2007), Artists Space (Things Fall Apart All Over Again, New York, 2005), and San Diego Museum of Art (Farsites: Urban Crisis and Domestic Symptoms in Recent Contemporary Art, inSite_05, San Diego, 2005).