Ricardo Brey: Fuel to the fire

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The Galerie Nathalie Obadia is very pleased to announce the retrospective exhibition of artist Ricardo Brey at the MHKA (Contemporary Art Museum of Antwerp, Belgium), beginning on 6 February 2015.

Titled "Fuel to the Fire", the exhibition is the result of a long partnership between Bart De Baere, the director of the MHKA, and the Cuban artist Ricardo Brey, who has lived in Belgium for more than twenty years.
The retrospective will be held simultaneously in three places in Antwerp: the MHKA, the Royal Athenaeum, and the Baroque Church of St Paul.

The exhibition was previously held in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, Cuba (2014). However, in Antwerp its scope and size will be much greater. ‘'Fuel to the fire" will present for the first time a complete and large-scale overview of Ricardo Brey’s production. Some of the works on show have never been seen by the public since they were executed, which may be as long as 20 or 30 years ago.

Of the works he produced in his early days, the exhibition will present the installation The Structure of Myths and Papeles de Verrazzo (the latter an installation composed of 137 drawings/sheets), both dating from 1985, which are being shown for the first time since 1986. Also on show will be Ricardo Brey’s major work (Untitled, Documenta IX, Kassel, 1992), which has been restored especially for the occasion.

Other works to be rediscovered include 21 Showcases, which will be accompanied by 3D drawings on rolls of paper from a mechanical piano, which Ricardo Brey showed in 1997 at the Salzburg Kunstverein (Austria). Today these belong to the collection of the Flemish Community and have not been shown since they were acquired.

The exhibition will also offer visitors a series of 21 boxes, most of which have been specially conceived by Brey for the occasion. Their presentation by the artist himself, which will be codified by a particular ritual, has elements of a performance. The boxes are designed for visitors to interact with. Placed inside one another like Russian dolls, they progressively reveal the simultaneously cultivated and utopian world of Ricardo Brey as they are opened. The artist describes his “reliquaries” as Lagerstätten, a German word from the science of palaeontology used to mean the geological layers that give information about the biodiversity of a given era. The scientific word is well chosen for those who wish to open – layer by layer – Ricardo Brey’s Pandora’s Box.

Lastly, ten or so large installations will be presented, also for the first time, which are the outcome of Brey’s most recent research. They make use of photography, a new medium in his work. In his photographs, we see objects that he recycles so as to compose sorts of “photo-sculptures”, which are subjected to the same presentation ploys as his installations, such as the photographs of tree stumps shown at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana in 2014. In that series, the importance given to detail, heightened by the dimensions of the photographs and the technique of printing on canvas, is typical of the artist’s naturalist approach. He uses the word “organic” to describe this technique because, for this Cuban artist, nothing is without life. In his guise as demiurge shaman, Ricardo Brey reveals this a little more to us in each of his new projects.

Ricardo Brey’s ode to life is most eloquently embodied in the recycling even of objects whose useful life is over – the common thread of his poetic and spiritual work. By offering a second life to assorted materials, he shares a lineage with Duchamp, Beuys and Arte Povera, which have provided him with inspiration. At first appearance chaotic, Brey’s works all flirt with the notions of chance: the casual encounter of different materials, forms and textures all initially appear to run counter to one another, but the carefully orchestrated confrontation between these elements is what in fact imbues the whole with sense and gives substance to a personal mythology in constant evolution. Ricardo Brey – an established artist at a crucial moment in the history of Cuban art, as well as being a Flemish artist by adoption – creates highly contemporary works as part of a total and ongoing project conceived for the future with the goal of representing universal values.

The retrospective at the MHKA includes two exhibitions in other venues. The banqueting hall/dining room of a nineteenth-century high school in the Royal Athenaeum will host the 1004 drawings in the Universe series (2002–2006), arranged in the 99 display cabinets designed for their first presentation, at the S.M.A.K. in Ghent in 2006.

And the Church of St Paul, close to Antwerp’s central railway station, will exhibit the solar system of Every Life is a Fire (2010–12), an installation placed on the high altar of this monument famous for its collection of Baroque sculptures and paintings.