Press Release

First Local Exhibition of Chilean Master Murua
Being held at ArtSpace / Virginia Miller Galleries                                                         

December 5, 2000
 

More than 200 works by the Chilean master artist Mario Murua are being shown at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables in the artist’s first major exhibition in Miami-Dade County. 

The show includes selected paintings from the artist’s Paris years and his most recent Chilean works, with a spectacular installation of nearly 100 hanging and floor sculpture.

Considered with Roberto Matta as one of the two leading artists of Chile, Murua’s most recent exhibition in South Florida was a major one-person show last summer at the Boca Raton Museum of Art.

“Murua has created a body of work that has begun to shed western influences such as painting on canvas,” said gallery owner-director Virginia Miller. “Most of his current paintings saturate unprimed cotton, much like the dyed works of his ancestors. His painted sculpture is on a base of copper or palm fronds from his native Chile.”

Murua’s subject matter is shown in his own visual language, called “canimagismo,” derived from the ritual, “cannibalistic” consumption of the images of nature and humans alike, she noted.

Political strife forced Murua to flee Chile. After a lengthy journey through South America that included stays with various indigenous groups, he arrived in Paris. For the next twenty years he cultivated his Latin American roots into a powerful visual vocabulary.
While Murua was in Paris, his work was included in a landmark exhibition at the Grand Palais. The largest show of Latin American art ever held in Europe, it was widely credited with stimulating the international renaissance of interest in Latin American art that continues today.

The Grand Palais exhibition and his boundless energy led Murua to form Magie-Image, a diverse group of Latin American artists in Paris whose works were featured in a number of important exhibitions. One guest curator called Magie-Image “the single most important contemporary Latin American movement in 20th Century Europe.”

Virginia Miller notes that “because of its broad scope, this exhibition offers an extraordinary opportunity to become familiar with the work of an important artist who has not been widely shown in this area. It should not be missed by anyone interested in contemporary art and especially Latin American art. ”

The exhibition “Viaje a las Islas Murua/Voyage to the Muruan Island” will
be displayed through February 1st.  Many of these works will be featured through
March 2001 in the gallery’s annex.

Located in the heart of the restaurant district of Coral Gables at 169 Madeira Avenue, ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries, the longest-established contemporary fine art gallery in Miami-Dade County, has presented major exhibitions of emerging, mid-career and master Latin American artists since the mid-1970s.



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