Black Electric Chair (Primary Title)
Ivan Navarro, Chilean, born 1972 (Artist)
Navarro’s Black Electric Chair brings together two modernist moments—the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s. The form of the sculpture is borrowed from Marcel Breuer’s 1925 Wassily Chair and evokes the progressive society that Breuer thought would follow as a result of modern design principles spilling over into everyday life. Navarro’s use of artificial light also recalls Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tube sculptures of the 1960s, formalist work that demonstrated the sometimes sublime, sometimes “brain dead” effects of light on its surroundings. Here the electric chair suggests the violence latent in vaunted modernist technologies. More specifically, it refers to the torture of political detainees as practiced by Augusto Pinochet’s regimein Chile when Navarro was growing up there.
This is the number "2" of an edition 3 + 1 A.P. identical works. (source of information: the artist's Certificate, signed and dated June 14, 2007. See Curatorial Department file)
Signature is on certificate in curatorial file.
Kathleen Boone Samuels Memorial Fund
Artificial Light, VCUarts Anderson Gallery, September 15 - October 29,
2006; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA at Goldman Warehouse), December 7, 2006 - February 18, 2007
2006; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA at Goldman Warehouse), December 7, 2006 - February 18, 2007
© Ivan Navarro
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