Rotunda Projects: Federico Uribe

Federico Uribe (Colombian, b. 1962) creates magical creatures and playful installations from everyday objects. For the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, he will install a large-scale site-specific environment in the museum’s rotunda. Uribe produces immersive and dreamlike landscapes by transforming materials such as books, colored pencils, wood fragments, and discarded clothing into animals and natural habitats. These new and innovative forms are simultaneously entrenched in formal art-making traditions while breaking free of their constraints. They are sculptures that are not sculpted but constructed and woven in curious and unpredictable, repetitive and almost compulsive ways. They follow the classical canon of figurative and abstract art, but the result is absolutely whimsical and yet powerful.

Born in Bogota, Colombia, Uribe lives and works in Miami. He studied art at the University of The Andes in Bogota and in 1988 left for New York to study under the supervision of conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer. It was the beginning of a journey that included years of studies and work in Cuba, Mexico, Russia, England, and finally Miami. Beginning in 1996, he built a new practice by casting aside traditional artist tools to focus on the “usually neglected beauty” of simple objects in daily use. The Brooks is pleased to invite Federico Uribe to produce the fourth installation in the Rotunda Projects series, which was inaugurated for the museum’s centennial.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website