Redefining how art is seen and experienced ™
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VISION artist in focus: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle was born in 1961 in Madrid. He received BA degrees in art and art history and Latin American and Spanish literature from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1983 and an MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989. His early work was oriented toward collaborations with urban communities and resulted in the founding of Street-Level Youth Media, a community arts organization for Chicago youth. His subsequent projects have incorporated a variety of mediums. Tires suspended from a gallery ceiling in Flotilla (1991) make reference to illegal immigration to the United States. Assigned Identities (1991) comprises images of ID cards in which some details are concealed and others revealed. The sculptural works Subwoofer(1995) and Bloom (1995–96) incorporate unorthodox materials such as car sound systems and firearms. The video trilogy Le Baiser/The Kiss (1999), Climate (2000), and In Ordinary Time (2001) critique the Modernist architecture of Mies van der Rohe. In recent sculpture—such as Cloud Prototype No. 1 (2003), a gargantuan, cloudlike metallic form—Manglano-Ovalle has experimented with spectacular scale. For Phantom Truck, presented at Documenta 12 in 2007, he created a physical manifestation of the biological weapons lab described by Colin Powell before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which during the war was reassessed and deemed incapable of manufacturing said weapons.
Manglano-Ovalle’s first solo exhibition was at Gallery 2 in Chicago in 1989. This was followed by solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1997), Instituto Cultural Cabañas in Guadalajara, Mexico (1997), Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (2000), Barcelona Pavilion (2002), Sala de Exposiciones de la Fundación “la Caixa” in Madrid (2003), and Art Institute of Chicago (2005), among others. Group exhibitions in which he has participated include the Bienal de São Paulo (1998); Best of the Season at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut (1999); Whitney Biennial (2000); Search, an exhibition of site-specific projects commissioned by In SITE 2000 in San Diego (2001); Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum andGuggenheim Museum Bilbao (2002 and 2003); Venice Biennale (2004); Liverpool Biennial (2005); Corcoran Biennial (2005); Documenta 12 in Kassel (2007); and Art 38 Basel (2007). He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1995), the Media Arts Award from the Wexner Center for the Arts (1997), a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2001), a Bicentennial Medal from Williams College (2005), and a Medium Award in Fine Arts from Material ConneXion in New York (2007). He lives and works in Chicago.