THE SILENT CLIFF: THE GATE, THE HOUSE, THE GARDEN, THE PEOPLE: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

The gallery is extremely pleased to announce its fourth solo exhibition with Ernesto Neto, an ambitious exploration of form, material, scale and physical interaction entitled ‘The silent cliff: the gate, the house, the garden, the people.’ Opening March 22, Neto constructs an elaborate sequence of sculptural environments with each room functioning as a spatial metaphor: entrance, architectural structure, landscape, and the figure. Presenting sculpture as sensual experience, Neto positions the visitor as a sensitive organism moving through a universe of his construction. Representing a dramatic departure from the surreal Utopian vision of transparency and sensuality that Neto has put forth in previous installations, Neto presents a new environment carved with a brutality and opacity.

The work is a trip, the road is an odyssey- what basis can we use now to contruct the ideal world. We are only now even more aware than ever, at the new millenium how far we are from a better civilization.

The drawing is a road, cut by the artist with a blade...

The transparency – dreamlike environment has moved to the movmen construction/production, division of the body... the delicate and elegant... had become brutal...
Tension and equilibrium still effect – skin surface still essential, but the result is more fixed... the result, or trace or mark of the moment of cut 

---- a sequence of moments, searched for the utopian – sympathy of community and natrue more sensuality and feminine – less perverse and fake
see with eyes closed 

the cut is done, committed, no turning back – equation of mathematics and hisotr

Each of the sculptural environments in the exhibition has been constructed through a process of individually carved foam elements. These elements are joined to form architectural stuctures within the respective gallery space. The visitor moves through these structures, first confronting and then entering a pavilion-like gate structure. The visitor is then led into an environment that Neto has entirely enclosed - 'the living space' or house. Visitors walk and crawl upon this architecturally abstract construction. The main gallery space shifts in reference to the landscape wherein the visitor is introduced to a manicured garden-like maze of solid foam. Finally, in the rear gallery, Neto presents several figurative elements, the so-called inhabitants of this constructed world.

Ernesto Neto's recent solo exhibitions include MCA, Sydney; Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, among numerous others. Later this year, Neto will have a solo exhibition at MoCA, LA and the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia.