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Exhibition Opening for Albano Afonso: Self Portrait as Light
March 20, 2015 @ 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Free and open to the public
Join us for the official opening of our newest exhibition, Albano Afonso: Self Portrait as Light. The exhibition opens at 5pm and extends throughout 21c Museum Hotel Cincinnati’s first floor Galleries and continues next door at the Contemporary Arts Center. Starting at 6:00pm, a cash bar and light appetizers will be available. Albano Afonso and VP, Museum Director Alice Gray Stites will also be in attendance to discuss the exhibition.
About the exhibition
Such is the enigma and opportunity of collaboration, where two partners erase their edges to cobble a shared space where one is seen and understood through the other. Albano Afonso’s forthcoming exhibition Self-Portrait as Light will be co-curated by the CAC and 21c Museum, bringing together our organizations for the first time to co-present the Brazilian artist’s first solo American exhibition. Afonso’s poetic practice transforms traditional genres—landscape and still life, alongside portraiture—into a multi-faceted, multi-media meditation on physical and psychological perception. The gardens of Eden Afonso maps and mutates in his Paraisos (Paradise) series dissolve dichotomies between the wild and the domesticated, the organic and the artificial, while the shimmering constellations, Estrelas, animate the twinned mirrors of interior and exterior space. Journeying through art history, science, and urban, wild, and imagined space, Afonso’s art repeats the essential question of time, engaging the viewer in a confrontation with and celebration of mortality. This dual-venue exhibition will chart Afonso’s time-space continuum on the 4th floor galleries of the CAC, and travel to the lobby space at 21c, where layered landscapes and bejeweled bones will cast light and shadow on ourselves and our surroundings. Across his photos, flashbulbs, illuminations and interventions you will see art and us in a more unfamiliar, interconnected way.
Steve Matijcio, Curator, Contemporary Arts Center
Alice Gray Stites, Museum Director and Chief Curator, 21c Museum
