Ernesto Neto - Malmo

18 feb - 1 may 2006

Ernesto Neto works with abstract installations which often take up the entire exhibition space. His materials are gossamer-thin, light, stretchable fabrics in nylon or cotton. Like fine membranes fixed to the ceiling by long, stretched threads his works hang down into the room and create shapes that are almost organic. Sometimes they are filled with scented spices and hang in tear-shaped forms like gigantic mushrooms or huge stockings, sometimes he creates peculiar soft sculptures which the visitor is allowed to feel through small openings in the surface. He also creates spatial labyrinths which the visitor can enter and thereby experience the work and interact with it.

Neto’s art is a sensual experience which creates associations with the body and with something organic. He describes his works as an exploration and a representation of the body’s landscape from within. It is important to Neto that the viewer should actively interact with and physically experience his work by feeling, smelling, and touching it.

For Malmö Konsthall Neto will create a completely new work which he is calling The Malmö Experience. The exhibition in Malmö will provide an extensive overview and synopsis of Neto’s oeuvre and contain a number of important works which will be presented in a new way. In a huge “organic labyrinth” of fabrics and shapes, which takes up the entire exhibition space, the visitor can experience the work from both inside and outside. The exhibition is based on the colours of the rainbow and the body labyrinth/organism consists of a number of smaller spaces which together constitute the whole.