Settlers. Her work is focused on architectural and objectual form and on the study of objects that thrust our lives and shape our relation with the world. Through an ironical approach on Modernism she develops projects that relate to our bodies but also to our expectations about the images we produce and use.
Rita McBride is a North American artist born in 1960 who currently lives and works in Dusseldorf.
Her work is focused on architectural and objectual form and on the study of objects that thrust our
lives and shape our relation with the world. Through an ironical approach on Modernism and on its
main guidelines (both when articulation with the world and the artistic tradition of the vanguards
are concerned), Rita McBride develops projects that relate to our bodies but also to our
expectations about the images we produce and use. Alongside with her sculpture work, regularly
shown by Galeria Pedro Oliveira, McBride produces the catalogues of her exhibitions recovering
genres of popular literature and inviting other artists to collaborate in their conception. Through
this practice the documentation of her work has been put aside favouring the broader scope of the
expansion of artistic activity into a printed media, creating artist books.
The project now being presented is an exploration on how we appropriate languages from the
many three-dimensional devices we commonly use, all instruments of what we now call the
“hyper-complexity of the world we live in”. In this way the possibilities of both architecture and
design are the groundwork for unconventional re-interpretations and usages of these instruments,
diverging from their traditional principles. They collaborate in the creation of new moments and
ways of looking at our forwarding relations with aesthetical, political and ontical procedures when
dealing with three-dimensionality. Sometimes apparently functional, others symptomatically
formal, this new context transforms sculpture in a crystallization of these hybrid relations of
appropriation.
Delfim Sardo
Opening Friday 18 th April 10pm
Galeria Pedro Oliveira
Calcada de Monchique, 3 - Porto
Tue-sat 15-20
Free admission