Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time

The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Fundación Cruz-Diez, also in Houston, will present beginning on February 6, 2011, the first large-scale retrospective by this pioneering French-Venezuelan artist. For more than five decades Carlos Cruz-Diez has been intensely experimenting with the origins and optical attributes of color. Among his works, there are unconventional structures of color, installations with light environments, street interventions, architectural integration projects, as well as experimental works centered on optical responses of the human eye in connection to the participatory nature of color. Entitled Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time, the exhibition will feature more than 150 works created from the 1940s to today. It will include paintings, serigraphies, and innovative chromatic structures; room-size chromatic environments, architectural models, and videos; as well as a virtual re-creation of Cruz-Diez´s studio. The point of departure for Cruz-Diez´s chromatic inquiries is the unstable nature of color. According to the artist, color is not a pigment on a solid surface but a "situation" that stems from the projection of light on objects and the way this light is processed by the human eye. Insofar as color depends on the movement of the viewer in front of the work, it involves a participatory and interactive experience in space and time. The artist's job is to provoke ¿situations¿ that stimulate a dialogue between stability and the unstable nature of color on a variety of supports and through multiple strategies and unconventional materials that include cardboard, aluminum, polished stainless-steel, and acrylic paint. Accompanied with a major catalogue, Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time is curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas. Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time will be exhibited at the MFAH´s Caroline Wiess Law Building from February 6 to July 4, 2011. According to Peter C. Marzio, the MFAH's recently-deceased director, "Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time celebrates the artist´s revolutionary achievements with color that have secured him a place as one of the most remarkable and innovative artists of the late Twentieth Century."