Charles Juhasz-Alvarado's most important sculpture and ideas from the last ten years navigate many mediums. They are playful monoliths, combining monumental size with biting satire and political humor. In I-Scream (resist!) (2004) the artist complicates the history of Puerto Rican-American relations through the depiction of the 1983 robbery of a Wells Fargo van by the Macheteros (a pro-independence Puerto Rican organization) with an ice cream truck complete with a Mount Rushmore-shaped Popsicle. The Garden of Forbidden Fruit / Duty-Free Zone (2002) is a complex installation exploring how the merging of divergent cultures creates desires and consequent limitations through a hilarious depiction of a Puerto Rican airport. The airport becomes the ultimate metaphor for the opposition of the Puerto Rican and American experiences. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a new, commissioned work titled Winged Termite: Flying Machine. This massive installation, made rather ironically from wood, references Leonardo daVinci’s idea to build a flying machine modeled on the shape, proportions and mechanics of flying animals such as birds, bats or, in this case, a winged termite.
The Puerto-Rican artist was born in 1965 at the Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines to a Hungarian father and a Puerto Rican-Cuban mother. He now works and resides in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Juhasz-Alvarado was chosen to be Puerto Rico’s representative at the Bienal de Saő Paulo, Brazil (2002). He has also exhibited in: Octava Bienal de La Habana, Havana, Cuba (2003); II Biennale of Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic (2005), Zverev Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia (2006), and most recently at the Singapore Biennale (2006).
Museo Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico Web Site
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TRAVEL CALENDAR
