TCC Sculpture Blog: Michael Lineares

The Puerto Rican artist lives and works in San Juan. His work however, reaches much further, with numerous international exhibitions including The Lawrimore Project, Seattle; Institute of Contemporary Art of Pennsylvania (ICA); CANADA Gallery, New York; The Peace Tower, a project by Mark di Suvero & Rirkrit Tiravanija for the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York (2006), among others. Recently Linares has been included in The Generational: Younger Than Jesus/Artists Directory, a publication that will accompany the triennial of the same name in the New Museum, New York. Found and Lost is the first solo show for Linares in Puerto Rico and is presented as part of the New Tendencies program.

For the majority of his career Linares has blended the concerns and methods of Transgressive, Conceptual, and appropriative art with popular culture in order to create his own unique iconography, some times controversial and always engaging. His work explores contemporary obsessions with everything from sex and desire, to race and gender, to media, and commerce. In Found and Lost, as the viewer passes through the exhibition space they are led through a collection of works that originate from existing works of art, which have been modified in order to reactivate and redirect their latent meanings—underlining the constant process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of this meaning present in each act of reading. In the case of both You Lookin’ at Me?, You Lookin’ at Me?, You Lookin’ at Me? and What does it say to you? these actions test not only the valid ity of the works being referenced, but also that of his own work, and suggests the revision of the position of the author as much as that of the spectator.

http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=574844:michael-lineares&catid=166:international&Itemid=723
http://www.artnet.com/artwork/425937483/423908876/michael-linares-afterlife.html
http://jameswagner.com/2006/04/michael_linares.html