Carlos AmoralesMexican, 1970Triangle Constellation
About the sculpture
Amorales creates work in a wide range of media—from drawing and painting to sculpture, performance, and film—focusing on contemporary rituals and symbols. He studied art in Amsterdam during the 1990s and gained international attention for his “Amorales vs. Amorales” performances, inspired by lucha libre, the costumed world of Mexican amateur wrestling. The artist’s early work encompassed the decade-long creation of what he calls the Liquid Archive, a database of primarily black, white, and red graphic images, including birds, skulls, spiders, and trees. Amorales used this as a rich resource for his subsequent work, incorporating the forms into paintings, prints, animation, and objects. He interweaves familiar secular and religious symbols with the idea of performance, presenting narratives in which the viewer reads or plays a role.
Read on
In this installation, Amorales has greatly enlarged the traditional musical triangle, creating a mobile of suspended forms, which, as the artist explains, “create the visual idea of sound, a notion that can be realized so that the piece becomes performative as well.” Amorales conceived Triangle Constellation for the Calderwood Courtyard as a means of creating a collective experience. The sculpture can be played with a long stick, producing music that filters from the courtyard into the surrounding galleries, and unifying these spaces with vivid elements of sound and performance.
Harvard Art Museums
Particulars
- Accession number
- 2015.14
