Gyula Kosice
Argentine, 1924-
Red, 1968
plexiglas, lightbox, wood, electrical cord
37 x 23 1/2 x 12 1/2 in.
SBMA, Gift of the ARCO Collection
1995.53.7
In 1940 Kosice proposed a project called "Hydrospatial City." Essentially a series of models, sculptures, architectural designs, and a number of other multi-media works. All of which flesh out the concept of "a sustainable community of mobile habitats." This photo shows Gyula at its installation, Houston 2009.
COMMENTS
Gyula Kosice is as much an artist as he is an inventor. Combining aesthetics, science, and technology, Kosice has constantly sought to produce art concerned with the future. Always experimenting with new materials, he was the first artist known to make a work entirely out of neon gas and glass tubing and invented what he termed “hydraulic sculpture,” the use of moving water as a sculptural medium. His impulse has always been to dematerialize the static or solid.
Hungarian by birth, Kosice left the political instability of Europe at the age of four to live with relatives in Argentina. He became a leading figure of the Argentine avant garde as a founding member of the Madí group in the mid-1940s, which called for an abstract art free from expression, representational forms, and discrete meaning.
From 1946 to 1972, Kosice developed La ciudad hidrospacial (The Hydrospatial City), a vast, evolving group of sculptures and maquettes expressing the artist’s preoccupation with utopian living and space exploration. In response to the exponential growth of the world’s population and the immanent depletion of its natural resources, Kosice conceived of this supra-terrestrial city suspended in space. Although Recepción-emisión and Red are not part of La ciudad hidrospacial, they share similar hemispherical and teardrop forms as well as the artist’s ongoing use of light as a medium.
SBMA title card information 2013
Gyula Kosice is an Argentinian kinetic artist whose work includes the use of light, color, space, and form and channels themes of utopianism, culture, time and space. Kosice is a member of the MADI movement, an abstract artistic movement that started in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1946. MADI is an acronym which stands for "Movimiento, Abstracción, Dimensión, Inveción (Movement, Abstraction, Dimension, Invention)."
“Man is not to end his days on Earth,” the Argentinian artist Gyula Kosice wrote in 1944. Beginning two years later, and continuing for the next quarter-century, Kosice explored the architectural implications of this assertion through the Hydrospatial City, his most ambitious and longest-running project, which depicts a utopian community suspended in space. By the early 1970s, the city had evolved into a series of sculptural maquettes, including 19 three-dimensional space habitats. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, acquired the installation, and exhibited it in its entirely—for the first time outside Kosice’s studio—2009.
http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20090604/gyula-kosices-hydrospatial-city-lands-in-houston
http://www.artelectronicmedia.com/artwork/hydrospatial-city