Under the Horizon

source: oswaldomacia

Oswaldo Maciá’s artistic practice seeks to question assumptions about knowledge and perception. The ways in which we attempt to understand our place in the world is structured through conventions and expectations that often overwhelm our direct perception of what surrounds us.

At Rohkunstbau Maciá shows ‘Under the Horizon’, a work that employs sculptural conventions and narrative expectations. A plinth elevates a bath to eye level – a signal that this domestic object has been removed from its vernacular context. From the taps black liquid is running, unchecked and overflowing.

Emanating from the flow is a scent, unfamiliar and uncontainable within language. Maciá has commissioned the perfumer Ricardo Moya to create the smell of ‘under’, an abstract term deriving its meaning from context. To perceive ‘under the horizon’, as the title instructs, is to pay attention to a realm beneath the infinite and general. The horizon line is an incommensurable used to navigate between one place and another, a line to which vision is calibrated.

Maciá is particularly concerned with how external stimuli we receive from the world are translated into images and information through our senses, mediated by what-we-think-we-know. ‘Under the Horizon’ moves from an ocularcentric register of perception, using smell to embrace the subjectivities of memory – be they based on our own perception or adopted from indirect experience.
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source: mde11org

Oswaldo Maciá (1960) es un artista cartagenero (Colombia) que ha residido en Londres las 2 últimas décadas. Comenzó sus estudios con una licenciatura en la Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes (Cartagena); en La Escuela Llotja (España) estudió pintura mural; en London Guildhall University obtuvo su licenciatura en Escultura y en en el Goldsmith’s College de la Universidad de Londres alcanzó su Maestría en Artes.
Su obra centra la atención en cómo nuestros sentidos perciben la información del mundo exterior, cuestiona lo que creemos saber, además de reflexionar sobre los supuestos existentes entre conocimiento y percepción.
Maciá ha presentado su trabajo en espacios como: Alison Jacques Gallery (Inglaterra, 2011), Schloss Marquardt Potsdam (Alemania, 2011), Espaivisor (España, 2011), Haunch of Venison (Inglaterra, 2010), White Box (EE.UU., 2009), Fri-Art (Suiza, 2007), Marian Goodman Gallery (Francia, 2007), Museum of Contemporary Art (Australia, 2007), South London Gallery (Inglaterra, 2007), 51st Venice Biennial (Italia, 2005), Daros LatinAmerica Collection (Suiza, 2005), Tate Liverpool (Inglaterra, 2004), Bienal de Shangai (China, 2004), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (España, 2003).