Arena, 1994-2012

Although Rita McBride's formative years (1960), first at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York) and later at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), respond to a minimalist orthodoxy in her use of geometric systems and standardized elements, her initial works of the late 1980s already convey an irrepressible desire to go beyond the relational systems derived from minimalist three-dimensional reductionism and to adopt an architectural logic, and not only to expand on the minimalist three-dimensional logic, but also to expand on it, already in his initial works of the late 1980s there is an irrepressible desire to go beyond the relational systems derived from minimalist three-dimensional reductionism and adopt architectural logic, not only to expand the sculptural strategy to the spatial, but also to influence, following the line opened by artists such as Michael Asher and Hans Haacke (see Arquitectura Viva 144), the logic of the art system as an institution. Hence, the artist's sculptures and installations should be examined as heterogeneous networks that challenge both the functional in the architectural field and the formal in the objectual. The artist conceives each installation from its multiple references to the exhibition framework, in the same way that the exhibition space makes no sense if it is not framed within the framework of an institutional space?...[+]