artnexus #27

Tunga (1952) forms part of that group of artists who in the 1980s became interested in using their plastic elements as a means of access to knowledge. The basic resources of his sculptures and installations concepts are taken from nature and various cultural models, the idiosyncratic development of his work makes any schematic classification of his production impossible.

His use of such varied materials as metals, rubber, and magnets and the inclusion of resources taken from physics, such as electricity, thermodynamics, or the topology of the Möbius strip, transform his spaces into sources of strange situations. This combination of contrasting materials creates unexpected and disturbing analogies which involve the spectator in other kinds of relationships with the physical world. Ideas such as exterior/interior, beginning/end, conceived within the traditional framework of our binary thinking processes, are called into question as the artist uses the created object to suggest other forms of thought not only in physical space but in the space of the mind.

IVONNE PINI