Rita McBride is a North American artist born in 1960 who currently lives and works in Dusseldorf. Her work is focused on architectural and objectual form and on the study of objects that thrust our lives and shape our relation with the world. Through an ironical approach on Modernism and on its main guidelines (both when articulation with the world and the artistic tradition of the vanguards are concerned), Rita McBride develops projects that relate to our bodies but also to our expectations about the images we produce and use. Alongside with her sculpture work, regularly shown by Galeria Pedro Oliveira, McBride produces the catalogues of her exhibitions recovering genres of popular literature and inviting other artists to collaborate in their conception. Through this practice the documentation of her work has been put aside favouring the broader scope of the expansion of artistic activity into a printed media, creating artist books.
The project now being presented is an exploration on how we appropriate languages from the many three-dimensional devices we commonly use, all instruments of what we now call the “hyper-complexity of the world we live in”. In this way the possibilities of both architecture and design are the groundwork for unconventional re-interpretations and usages of these instruments, diverging from their traditional principles. They collaborate in the creation of new moments and ways of looking at our forwarding relations with aesthetical, political and ontical procedures when dealing with three-dimensionality. Sometimes apparently functional, others symptomatically formal, this new context transforms sculpture in a crystallization of these hybrid relations of appropriation.

Delfim Sardo