The Soul Of Miami

El Balcon De La Habana Alumbra El Cielo De Miami
Monday November 28, 2016 from 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Lighting of the sculpture will be at 7:30 pm.
Museum Park
1075 Biscayne Blvd
Miami, FL 33132
RSVP to Maria Lanao at 786.514.0301 or maru@intersectionspr.com

Please join us in welcoming Havana’s Balcony to the Magic City and be among the first to witness the lighting of this monumental piece

The Spanish artist Juan Garaizabal is ready for his installation of Havana’s Balcony (Balcón de la Habana) at the Museum Park in the city of Miami. The steel structure will be presented under the framework of Miami’s Art Week. The piece is the first part of an initiative that will be completed with the installation of a sister sculpture in the Malecón of Havana in 2017.

Havana’s Balcony (Balcón de La Habana) is a 69 feet high sculpture – approximately the height of a six-story building. It has an imposing structure of stainless steel, partially coated with LED lights, that will be visible from the bay and land throughout the city, changing what is now the skyline of Miami. It will be located in Museum Park, the neurological center of culture and art in Miami, along with the Pérez Art Museum and The Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science. The Havana’s Balcony (Balcón de la Habana) in Miami will have a replica installation of a sculpture in the Cuban capital, which recreates the Miami’s Art Deco lines in 2017. The two sister sculptures will be placed facing each other. Through this work, the artist tries to not only recreate the symbol of a culture, but also the essence that lingers in the minds of many Cubans based in Miami. The structure will be an icon of the city.

“I intend to work where history is being made. Miami and Havana, are both having transcendental changes,” explained the artist Juan Garaizabal. “The idea is to materialize the physical connection that already exists and is rooted in Miami. A structure so symbolic such as the balconies of Havana is the perfect representation of nostalgia that this Caribbean city evokes in the majority of the Miami population. ”

Miami’s most prominent personalities such as Jorge Perez, Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, through the CIFO foundation, The Bayfront Park Management Trust Miami, and Mana Contemporary, as well as the artist’s foundation, Urban Memories, are involved in the support of the project.

About Juan Garaizabal
Juan Garaizabal is an internationally recognized conceptual artist and sculptor. His “Urban Memories (Memorias Urbanas),” are massive structures that alongside with their particular strategic location and lighting, strategically evoking architectural historical elements, signifying the memory of the cities. Despite being an artist of conceptual origins, as a sculptor his work is done by hand, using his own techniques such as: forging, carpentry, electricity, plasticity and masonry.

EDGE Collections’ 2016 Art Basel Exhibition at Island Gardens Deep Harbour
Monday, 11/28/2016 – 12/04/2016 09:00 am –
Island Gardens Deep Harbour
888 MacArthur Causeway,
Miami, Florida 33132

Cost: Free

Miami’s exquisite superyacht marina, Island Gardens Deep Harbour, will transform into the canvas for Miami-based design house EDGE Collections’ 2016 Art Basel exhibition. Acclaimed for its visually stunning wallpapers and textiles that fuse multiple layers of original imagery, EDGE brought together an exclusive group of international artists and designers to create a visual journey of tropical, nautical and visceral themes through mixed media, sculpture and scent right in the marina lounge.

The new works by artists Christina Lei Rodriguez, Atelier OÏ x L’ Atelier Casablanca, Eric Beare, Flëkz and Mert Özgen will debut at Island Gardens Deep Harbour from Nov. 28 – Dec. 4, with a curated celebration of art and design with the marina’s renowned panoramic views of Downtown Miami and Biscayne Bay as the back drop.

Italian Masters Do It Better
Thursday, 12/01/2016 – 06:00 pm – 09:00 pm
Valli Art Gallery
124 NW 25th Street,
Miami, Florida 33127
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Cost: FREE

We selected ITALIAN MASTERS DO IT BETTER as the title of the exhibition on the great contemporary Italian artists that founded and influenced important internationally celebrated art movements in the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s, until the year 2000 and onwards, because we wish to point out the excellent unique creativity of these masters, officially introducing their artworks in the United States during this millennium. The American public is familiar to the excellence of Italian creativity in contemporary design, fashion, food, automotive industry, music, literature, as well as in Italian Classic Art masters like Leonardo, Michelangelo or Rafael, but only the in deep contemporary art connoisseurs know that Alberto Biasi was widely celebrated at the Venice Biennial and at New York MoMA around the middle of the last century as one of the founders of the international kinetic movement. ITALIAN MASTERS DO IT BETTER will present these masters to the general public at art galleries, art fairs, museums, private and public institutions, as well as through media campaigns and publications. This unique exhibition will open at VALLI ART Gallery simultaneously with our Booth at the prestigious CONTEXT Art Fair, both in Wynwood, FL.

The Post-War era marks a period in Italian Arts and Design, when “the Italian reinvented the way of doing things.” The exhibition at Valli Art Gallery presents master artists that, from the end of the 40’s and the first half of the 60’s, worked on the “upgrade” of the concept of the canvas, not any more conceived as a space to underline a representation in favor of a more physical approach, direct and conceptual, which will transform the overall canvas and its support in an artistic object self-expressive that will open a subjective dialogue with the public. Consequently, artworks would reconnect to the world and to true life. From the first Manifesto of Spatialism in 1946, Lucio Fontana and Bruno Munari envisioned a new art that should be characterized by a physical study of matter, color and sound in movement, the rhythm resulting from a new work with the pictorial palimpsest, aimed to overcome the two-dimensional limitation of the canvas by creating a space, physical and conceptual at the same time. Bruno Munari, a most important Italian Leonardesque figure of the 20th century, dominated the 50’s-60’s Milanese scene in the years of the economic boom, in which was born the figure of the artist visual-operator that becomes business consultant while contributing to the Italian post-war industrial revival. Very young, Munari participated with the Futurism, from which separates with a sense of lightness and humor, inventing the Aerial Machine, 1930, the first ‘mobile’ in art history, and the Useless Machines, 1933. In 1948, he founded MAC, the Concrete Art

Movement, with Gillo Dorfles, Gianni Monnet and Atanasio Soldati. The movement was a worldwide catalyst of Italian abstract instances proposing a synthesis of the arts, able to combine traditional painting with new communication tools, to show to industrialists and artists-artists the possible convergence between art and technique. In 1947, Munari created Concave-convex, one of the first installations in art history. Lucio Fontana presented Black environment, 1949, at Galleria Naviglio in Milan.

Between December 1959 and July 1960, Enrico Castellani, Extended and bent inwards surfaces, and Piero Manzoni, Achrome, founded Galleria Azimut in Milan, followed by the journal Azimuth in collaboration with Agostino Bonalumi, Cushioned-canvases. Azimut and Azimuth had an echo and domino effect almost unimaginable, with a disruptive experimentation and a desecration of the tools of making art, offering to the spectator the new role of completing the work by an artist that conceptually, symbolically and physically, violated the canvas. In those same years, Paolo Scheggi reached similar artistic outcomes exhibiting his Intersurfaces in Florence. In 1965, Fontana involved Turi Simeti in the exhibit Zero Avantgarde at his Milanese studio, proving that the Sicilian artist wasn’t indifferent to the demands of the Spatialism. The exhibit makes a synthesis of two historical Italian movements with Alberto Biasi telling about Optical Art and with Castellani, Bonalumi and Scheggi about Spatialism. The show, following Azimut’s assumptions, investigates these artists, including their natural heirs, Giuseppe Amadio and Cesare Berlingeri, who dared to violate the canvas to rewrite history, building on it something unexpected and revolutionary based on the real use of space, the research on time and the analysis of the structures’ rhythm. A section of the show will present Mimmo Rotella and Giosetta Fioroni that in the same years explored at Rome POP expression and realistic Nouveaux. Including Michelangelo Pistoletto, the exhibition showcases masters and their followers that made Italian painting a center of autonomous visual perceptions, where viewers also became the protagonists of the canvas interpretation.