Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Le Baiser, 2000
Archival pigment print
Edition 7 of 8
29 x 63 in. (framed)

*This work will be exhibited in EAM's summer exhibition Mies's McCormick House Revealed: New Views, and must be lent to the museum for the show June 10 - August 26.

For over twenty-five years, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle has created multimedia works that are formally seductive, technologically sophisticated, conceptually rigorous, and poetic. He investigates global politics, explores ethic identities, and has examined iconic architecture's potential as a provocative subject. One of his most written about works, "Le Baiser/The Kiss," is photographic documentation of a window washer that carefully and lovingly cleaned the glass-and-steel Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe. Throughout the video, the young woman listens to headphones as the man moves about with his tools, and each seems to be isolated and detached by the clean, iconic building. Works from this series have been shown in numerous important exhibitions and collected by art museum collections around the globe including: the MCA Chicago, Orange County Museum, Yale University Museum, and Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid. This generous donation by the artist and gallery would add significantly to EAM's permanent collection if promised as a future gift by the owner.

Inigo Manglano-Ovalle (b. 1961, Madrid, Spain) lives and works in Chicago. His noted film trilogy Le Baiser/The Kiss (1999), Climate (2000), and In Ordinary Time (2001) focuses on the architecture of Mies van der Rohe and the implications of Modernism. Solo exhibitions include: The Art Institute of Chicago; The Krefeld Suite, Museum Haus Esters and Haus Lange, Krefend, Germany; El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City; Barcelona Pavilion, Fundación Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona, Spain; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. Group exhibitions include: Chicago Architecture Biennial, Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; InSITE, San Diego; Tempo, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moving Pictures, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, England, and Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Media Arts Award from the Wexner Center for the Arts, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Manglano-Ovalle's work is in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Gent, Belgium; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Bilbao, Spain; and others.