BRONX, NEW YORK.- The Bronx Museum of Arts presents “Valeska Soares: Follies,” on view through February 22, 2004. This exhibition consists of installations, sculpture, photography, and video that mix conceptual rigor with a baroque sensibility. Soares’ work embraces such seemingly disparate elements as restraint and excess, structure and chaos, and reason and emotion. The exhibition takes its cue from a recurring motif in her work—the garden folly—that, like her artistic practice, embodies the fragile boundaries between control and desire.

Soares’ work may be seen historically within the context of the experimental and conceptual-based works of the 1960s and 70s by Brazilian artists, including Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, and Hélio Oiticica. These artists created works that engaged all of the senses and radically transformed the role of the viewer from passive observer to active participant in the production of meaning. Moreover, Soares shares with her contemporaries, such as Polly Apfelbaum, Leonardo Drew, Felix González-Torres, Mona Hatoum, and Rachel Whiteread, an interest in expanding the critical framework of minimalism. Her work often subverts or parodies the cool, geometric aesthetic of minimalism and disrupts notions of purity and rationality through an assertion of a baroque sensibility. Other works explore the porous limits of the body, the construction of identity, and the links among the personal, social, and public realms.

Born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1957 and based in Brooklyn, New York since the early 1990s, Soares has developed a mature body of work during the last decade. She has received much critical acclaim through solo exhibitions at the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico (2003); Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1999); and the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon (1998) as well as participation in such international exhibitions and biennials as Elusive Paradise, National Gallery of Canada, Ontario (2001); Visiones del Sur: F(r)icciones, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2001); InSite 2000, San Diego, Tijuana; Ultra Baroque: Aspects of Post Latin American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2000); São Paulo Biennial (1998); Johannesburg Biennial (1997); and You Are Here, Royal College of Art, London (1997).

Valeska Soares: Follies is made possible by the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Altria Group, Inc.

For more than four decades Altria Group, Inc., the parent company of Kraft Foods, Philip Morris International and Philip Morris USA, has been a leading corporate supporter of the visual and performing arts, championing artists and arts organizations that inspire and reflect the qualities that the company values in its business operations - creativity, diversity, excellence and innovation. Through its commitment to the arts, the Altria family of companies has improved and revitalized the quality of life in communities worldwide. For more information about Altria’s contributions program, please visit www.altria.com/contributions.