Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Well 35°58'16"N – 106°5'21"W (site-specific land art, Santa Clara Pueblo, NM, 2014). Pictured: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (born 1961, Madrid, Spain) is an American conceptual artist known for multidisciplinary, socially oriented sculpture, video and installations and urban community-based projects of the 1990s. His work often explores a dialectical relationships involving minimalist aesthetics, the utopian ambitions of modernism and science, and the resulting—often negative—social, geopolitical and ecological consequences of such ideologies. New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that Manglano-Ovalle was adept in "distilling complex ideas into inviting visual metaphors," while Jody Zellen described his work as "infused with a formal elegance and sociopolitical content." Manglano-Ovalle has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, MASS MoCA, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), and participated in Documenta 12, the Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, and Bienal de São Paulo. He has been recognized with MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim, He has been a professor at Northwestern University since 2012 and lives and works in Chicago. He received BA degrees in art and art history and Latin American and Spanish literature from Williams College (1983), before earning an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1989. MASS MoCA (2009), Rochester Art Center (2006), Krefelder Kunstmuseen (2005), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (2004), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo (2003), and Galerie Thomas Schulte (2006–17), among others. His early projects employed multi-faceted, community-oriented strategies to explore cultural identity, migration and immigration, social and geographic boundaries, and urban violence. His later work evolved in a more conceptual direction, initiating wider sociopolitical dialogues on culture, science and technology, ecosystems, and geopolitics. He collaborated with a group of neighboring at-risk Latino teens, leading to the formation of Street-Level Video, a training collective that empowered youths to articulate street culture and community concerns about gang activity, gentrification, social control and cultural fragmentation.

Manglano-Ovalle explored similar issues in early sculpture and installations incorporating unorthodox elements, such as suspended inner tubes evoking the iconic bolsa (raft) (Flotilla, 1991), actual rafts (Balsero, 1994), He transforms research and data from many disciplines (engineering, architecture, genomics, climatology, astrophysics) into technologically sophisticated, often minimalist sculptures, videos and installations. The Garden of Delights (1998) re-visualized genetic coding in order to examine its potential use in the representation, portrayal and categorization of identity. Heavenly Bodies (2003) translated genetic coding into cloud motifs, whose celestial immateriality undermined notions of certainty associated with DNA testing. Iceberg (r11i01) (2005), a 25-foot sculpture consisting of a matrix of more than 1,600 aluminum tubes, captured the structure of a once-existing, 460-foot Labrador Sea iceberg from advanced radar and sonar data; juxtaposing the utopian vision of Fuller's geodesic dome (in crumpled form) with the threat of global warming, the sculpture intimated modernism's failure, particularly in another version shown on its side, Recumbent Iceberg (r11i01) (2006). Manglano-Ovalle built the vaguely industrial, container-like structure using computer renderings based on satellite images, State Department renderings and descriptions in Powell's speech. His permanent 2013 public work, Weather Field No. 1, is a kinetic array of weather vanes and anemometers for Tongva Park in Santa Monica, California. The installation Well (2014–5) comprises an exhibition and permanent work of land art in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico in which Manglano-Ovalle installed stainless steel hand pumps to manually extract water from aquifers below for public consumption. and National Endowment for the Arts (1995), as well as a Wexner Center for the Arts Media Arts Award (1997–2001) and Artadia Award (2008), Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Library of Congress, Museo de Arte Contemporane (Bilbao), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum für Moderne Kunst, National Gallery of Victoria, and Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK).