New York-based artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña has been selected to participate in the annual Turbine Hall Commission organized by the Tate Modern, where the artist presents large-scale new work at the main entrance to the Museum of London. Work for the site will open in October and run through April 2023.
A renowned poet who has authored more than 15 collections of poetry, Vicuña is known in the art world for a practice that spans across painting, sculpture and performance and addresses the themes of the fragility of life, human fragility, the environment, and social justice, typically showing how they are all closely related and intertwined with one another.
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Her most famous sculpture is the ‘Quipu’ series, large-scale, brightly colored hanging installations that take their name from the ancient Andean method of communication and are linked to them via colorful, interwoven fabric. (The Tate recently acquired Vicuña in 2017 Quipu . wombwhich first appeared in Documenta 14 in 2017.)
More recently, she began recreating a series of portraits she did early in her career in Chile, before her exile from her homeland in the early 1970s after the country’s violent military coup and subsequent dictatorship. He entrusted these works to his friends who remained in the country, many of whom have since lost.
Another group of the artist’s major works, which first began in the mid-1960s, are the small and intimate Precarius sculptures made up of many found objects – shells, feathers, stone, wood, cloth, and rubbish. At first, they were set up along the shores, so that they are eventually washed away by the high tide.
Although her career spans more than 50 years, Vicuña has only become a closely watched artist over the past decade, appearing in major exhibitions such as Documenta 14, the traveling exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 in 2017, Guangzhou Biennial 2021, and Shanghai Biennial 2021.
It will be included this year in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani, and was recently awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement by the Biennale. She did a major travel survey in 2017 that opened at the Center for Contemporary Arts, New Orleans, and will also be having a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York this year.
Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern, said in a statement: “Cecilia Vicuna has been an inspirational figure for decades, with the importance and urgency of her work rightly underlined by the upcoming Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award. As a tireless champion of environmental awareness and social justice, as well as Creating stunning and powerful artwork, I am delighted that Tate Modern will be working with Cecilia Vicuña on the upcoming Hyundai annual commission – I can’t wait for the unveiling in October.”
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