One of the most prestigious Brazilian contemporary artists, Tunga brings two new and unseen works that occupy the entire space of Galeria Millan in São Paulo. The artist presents the series Cristalinos, composed of two life size portals and twelve smaller versions on the main floor of the gallery and the installation Cooking Crystals Expanded, a continuation of the piece exhibited in the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, in 2009, on the first floor.
In Cristalinos, overwhelming plastic solutions, that mark the artists memorable production, compose a series of sculptures made with magnets, steel, crystal bottles and rock crystals. According to Carlos Basualdo, Tunga, since 1989 “attempts to redefine sculpture, not as an static volume, but also as a group of forms in expansions and the relation between them”.
In the installation Cooking Crystals Expanded, glass withholding an intriguing yellow liquid are held by threads to physiological residues, shared with rock crystals, hang from nine metallic structures that, as human bodies, interact with each other and with six more wall pieces, creating multiple dialogues. Each dialogue constructs a particular scene and the spectator is invited to participate as one more agent of this visceral experience, the subject is expressed by transmutation, inherent to the artistic process. According to Tunga, whose work reflect several areas of knowledge, going from science to poetics, the installation may be perceived as a “constellation of logic, a metabolic zone, a magnetic field, a cristalgraphic structure, a connection cloud or an eschatological nebula”.
One of the most important contemporary artists of the international scenario, with works in museums worldwide, Tunga (1952, PE) was one of the first artists to integrate the cast of Galeria Millan (1986). Cooking Crystals Expanded derives from the principals found in Laminated Souls, shown at Galeria Millan (2004), at Luhring Augustine and PS1/MoMA in New York (2007), when the artist also exhibited At the Light of Both Worlds, work that occupied the pyramid of the Louvre Museum in Paris (2005) and was seen by 4 million people.