Installation View | Calentamientos | 2015

Calentamientos

Saturday 25 April, 2015 — Monday 15 June, 2015

Miguel Ángel Cárdenas

curatorship: María Wills

We present the work of Amsterdam-based Colombian artist Miguel Angel Cárdenas, who is considered a pioneer in electronic media, performance and installation. The exhibition “Calentamientos” is a selection of his works around the theme of human heat and raises daring problems related to sexuality, eroticism and cultural and moral models. The artist’s homosexuality was one of the motivations behind his exile to Amsterdam, where he fled from the moralistic position of Colombia in the 1960s.

It is an honour for Instituto de Visión’s program, Visionarios, to present the work of Colombian artist Miguel Ángel Cárdenas (1934), a pioneer in electronic media, performance and installation art. Cárdenas moved to the Netherlands in 1961, where he produced a body of work that tackled bold topics for the time, such as sexuality, eroticism, paradigms of morality and Colombian cultural models in a European context.

The exhibition Warming-up is consists of a selection of works dealing with the theme of human warmth, understood from its most naive and innocent connotations to the most erotically explicit ones.

For example, the idea of being able to transform the rationalist and cold culture of the Dutch with the extroverted Latin-American temperament, to the most perverse connotations in relation to his homosexuality –a reality that forced the artist to flee from the moralist postures that existed in Colombia at the time.