David Medalla: Le Désir Cinétique...
Baró is pleased to announce David Medalla, Le Désir Cinétique..., an exhibition dedicated to the life and work of pioneering Filipino artist David Medalla (1938–2020), curated by Rolando J. Carmona in collaboration with Mountains, Berlin.
Conceived in the early 1960s, Medalla's Cloud Canyons, popularly known as Bubble Machines, are considered his signature body of work: sculptures of water and soap, continuously pumped through basins and tubes, generating unrepeatable formations of foam. Medalla described them as "auto-creative," in dialogue with fellow Signals co-founder Gustav Metzger's "auto-destructive" art. Medalla co-founded Signals London in 1964, a gallery and journal that became a meeting point for an international generation of artists, including Lygia Clark, who held her first UK solo exhibition there.
Paris was among the cities that shaped Medalla's practice. In 1960, philosopher Gaston Bachelard introduced his first performance in France, at the Academy of Raymond Duncan. He later lectured at the Sorbonne, and his work has been presented at the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d'Art Moderne, and the Jeu de Paume.
Le Désir Cinétique... brings one of Medalla's Bubble Machine sculptures to Paris, alongside an archive spanning six decades of his practice.
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