Ed Cross Fine Art is pleased to present new works by Cesar Cornejo at London Art Fair 2020. Filling the stand with an immersive installation across its walls, Cornejo will display accompanying figurative sculptures on plinths in an exhibition investigating monument and architecture as they intersect with social space – in Latin America, and beyond.
Cornejo will cover the booth’s surface in a wall made of small bricks, referencing the architecture of shanty towns where houses are often left unfinished to reveal their raw materials. Honouring the capacity of deprived populations to reinvent themselves in the face of adversity, the installation strives to embrace its visitors visually as well as physically. The tactile details of the handmade wall provide myriad opportunities to dive into the texture of its symbolic residues, as well as to navigate individual paths through its space and meaning.
Set amidst the brick tableau, three works from the series ‘Cristos del Alma’ address their monumental counterpoints in Latin America (and Cornejo’s native Peru) where public sculptures frequently sit in stark contrast to their surrounding poverty. Cornejo’s adopt the object-language of these statues to enact their inversion: faithful to the material and social reality of their ephemera and environment in South America, the artist uses cement, resin – and those shanty town bricks – to echo both his wall installation and its inspiration. Combined with the locally ubiquitous figure of Christ, Cornejo’s interventions propose a new manifestation of Latin American societies: truer, perhaps, to their realities than the municipal monoliths which pepper village and city squares.
Cesar Cornejo (b. Lima, Peru, 1966) is an interdisciplinary artists and activist. Having lived and worked across Peru, Japan, England and the US, his practice draws on diverse influences and cultures; after more than a decade as an associate professor at the University of South Florida, Cornejo has taught at the Manchester School of Art since September 2019. Recent residencies and exhibitions include The Body Says: I am a Fiesta, Norton Museum of Art (2019), The Bellagio Center Residency Program at The Rockefeller Foundation (2019), Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik Residency, Berlin (2018) and Time, Space, Process, Exhibition, Olson Gallery (2018). His work is held in international collections including Museo del Barrio (New York, USA), Tokyo National University Fine Arts Museum (Tokyo, Japan) and North American Cultural Institute (Lima, Peru).