23 maggio - 8 agosto 2010, Chicago
The Hyde Park Art Center is pleased to announce Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism, a major touring exhibition of contemporary art drawn from the French Regional Contemporary Art Funds (Frac) opening with a reception from 3-5pm on Sunday, May 23, 2010 and remaining on view through August 8, 2010. Spatial City brings togehter an international, multi-generational array of artists - with an emphasis on artists living in France - whose work contends with idealism, utopian thinking and, in counterpoint, the cynicism that follows a failed revolution and the retreat of optimism in the face of pragmatic reality. Spatial City is an art exhibition inspired by the theoretical architecture of the same name by Yona Friedman (b.1923). In his first manifesto Mobile Architecture (1958), Friedman defines the structures in this ideal city as being transformable, transportable and occupying as little ground area as possible, pushing the structures to hover over the earth rather than spread out along the surface. Friedman’s ideas, disseminated in the aftermath of World War II, have influenced subsequent generations both indirectly and directly. While Friedman’s ideas informed the framework of the show, the selection of artwork reflects the cycling and recycling of optimism and cynicism in postwar and contemporary culture. Artists in the exhibition are responding to society’s complex problems: the failed utopian social experiments that resulted in the dehumanizing conditions of Brutalist architecture, the rise and fall of totalitarian states, the tensions resulting from post-colonial immigration, and the destruction of the environment in the name of progress. Info: tel +1 773 3245520 fax +1 773 3246641 - e-mail: exhibitions@hydeparkart.org - www.hydeparkart.org