A Solo Installation by Minimalist Sculptor Lydia Okumura, Recreating Works in Situ from her Seminal Exhibition of 1984 at the Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo Presented in Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac's Ely Room gallery, Volume '84 is a solo installation by the Brazilian-Japanese, New York-based Minimalist sculptor and conceptual artist Lydia Okumura, whose work broke the artistic boundaries of the 1970s, expanding the tradition of the Brazilian geometric avant-garde with her multi-dimensional abstract environments.The five site-specific installations, originally realised for her major solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo in 1984, highlight a watershed moment in Okumura's career. Exemplifying the artist's sustained investigation into spatial possibilities and volume, Okumura's geometric steel mesh cubes and White Volume, a three-dimensional floor installation constructed from fabric and wire, will be newly realised.
For almost fifty years, Okumura has transformed space through geometric abstraction, her work blurring the boundaries between illusion and reality and provoking a reassessment of the conventional art-object experience. Her large-scale, often site-specific geometric compositions, realised mostly with acrylic paint, cotton string, painted aluminium sheets, fabric and wire, actively challenge our perception of the spatial world. Projected into three-dimensional space from walls and floors, they investigate the optical interplay between two- and three-dimensional forms.
Following Ropac's first presentation of Okumura's work in its group exhibition, Land of Lads, Land of Lashes in June 2018, Volume '84 offers visitors an opportunity to re-evaluate the complex multi-dimensionality of five key sculptures from a pivotal year in her artistic trajectory.