Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle

“If a thousand suns should rise all at once in the sky such splendor would resemble the splendor of that great Being”
Randomly generated image from Vanishing Sky, 2005–2006
Color ink jet
14×47" (image), 20×53" (paper)
Edition size: 30
5 AP’s, 5 PP’s, 1 BP
Printed by Jon Cone Studio
Retail Price: $3,750 (tax and shipping costs not included)

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is a professor, Department of Visual Arts, University of Chicago. Born in Madrid, Spain, in 1961, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle was raised in Bogotá Colombia and Chicago, where he currently lives, teaches and maintains a studio. Much of his early work was centered on community, concerned largely with issues of migration and immigration, ethnicity and place. Manglano-Ovalle is engaged in a process of understanding how certain extraordinary forces and systems, man-made and natural, are always and already in the process of remaking the world. Over the course of the last decade, he has worked in a wide range of media-activist-inspired public art, sculpture, film, sound, and photography, all of which fuse the politics of contemporary urban culture with poetic meditations on aesthetics, history, and identity.

Today, the artist continues to embrace the interdisciplinary. Working in collaboration with geneticists, biotech researchers, legal consultants, medical ethicists, architects, composers, writers, historians, and others, Manglano-Ovalle forges a creative enterprise unrivaled among his peers in its scope and complexity. Issues pertaining to personal and collective spaces, the negotiation of borders, and social injustice, which always have been central to his project, are still present. Now, however, the artist treats these concerns in a more abstract fashion, against a larger, metaphorical landscape of passages through time, space, atmosphere, and geography, with their attendant cultures of observation and documentation.

Manglano-Ovalle is the recipient of a 2001 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and is participating in Documenta 12, 2007.