WILLIAM CORDOVA

at ARNDT Berlin

8 March - 13 April 2013

ARNDT Berlin is pleased to present works by William Cordova (born 1971 in Lima, Peru).

William Cordova’s work is tied to an urban ecology of obsolescence, disparity, and displacement. Busted cars, trashed tires, discarded shoes, machetes, speakers and books yellowed with age provide the material support and iconographic program for his drawings, collages, and installations. For the artist, these material choices reference the reality of lived experience, as opposed to the spectacle of culture, mass-produced for constant consumption. The fluency with which Cordova traverses media and remixes cultural signifiers confirms his visual multilinguism, as barbed as it is lived-in.
Much of Cordova’s work induces similarly uncanny interpretive spirals, abetted not by arbitrary Surrealist juxtapositions but the all-too-common strangeness of our own detritus and the too-often repressed histories they conceal.

William Cordova lives and works in Lima, Miami and New York. He has earned his MFA from Yale University in 2004 and his BFA from The Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. In addition to staging solo exhibitions e.g. at the Fleming Museum, University of Vermont (2009), the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2005/06), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2003), he has taken part in groundbreaking group exhibitions, such as „NeoHooDoo“, Menil Collection, Houston, Texas (2008), and „Street Level“, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2007).

His work is in such public collections as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Yale Art Gallery, New Haven; Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru; Ellipse Foundation, Cascais, Portugal; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; and La Casa de las Americas, Havana, Cuba; among others. In 2006 Arndt & Partner Berlin presented the first solo show of William Cordova in Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include 'smoke signals: viviendo pa’ la ciudad' at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2012) and 'yawar mallku (royalty, abduction & exile)' at La Conservera in Murcia, Spain (2011). He has held numerous residencies and is currently a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Please note that ARNDT Berlin is also showing Erik Bulatov (born 1933 in Sverdlovsk, Russia).