Author Description

This volume accompanies the first major solo museum exhibition in the United States of the work of Argentinean-born, London-based artist Amalia Pica (born 1978). Pica explores metaphor, communication and civic participation through drawings, sculptures, large-scale photographic prints, slide projections, live performances and installations. Using simple materials such as photocopies, lightbulbs, drinking glasses, beer bottles, bunting and cardboard, Pica creates work that is both formally beautiful and conceptually rigorous. Pica is particularly interested in the limits and failures of language and human communication, and the ways in which thought translates to action, idea to object. Her work is optimistic in its reflection of moments of shared experience, often incorporating signifiers of celebration and communal gatherings such as fiesta lights, flags and banners, and confetti. <i>Amalia Pica</i> is the fourth volume in MCA Chicago's <i>MCA Monographs</i> series and features essays by writer Ana Teixeira Pinto and writer and curator Tirdad Zolghadr as well as an interview with the artist and exhibition co-organizers MITList Curator João Ribas and MCA Pamela Alper Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm.