"Against the extravagance of desire" by Carlos Bunga at the Crystal Palace

The Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga (Porto, 1976) presents his new installation Against the Extravaganza of Desire created specifically for the Crystal Palace, home of the Reina Sofia Museum in the Retiro Park, and which can be visited from 8 April to September 4th.

Bunga began his career in painting, but soon expanded his interests toward the conception of architecture as the language of power, questioning ingrained inertia as order or solidity. The cycles of nature that surround the Palace, as well as the context in which the building was originally built make up some of the keys to the new installation. The use of materials such as cardboard and adhesive tape are common in Bunga's work, which voluntarily dispenses with the grandiloquence of traditional materials and instead focuses on the precariousness of structures composed only of cardboard sheets and Tape.

As ephemeral constructions, subject to the circumstance of time and place, Carlos Bunga's interventions also have the capacity to deconstruct the spaces in which they are inserted conjuncturally in order to resignify them. This was the case, for example, with the compartments attached to the Kursaal Congress Center in San Sebastián for Manifesta 5 (2004), with the installation in the central courtyard of the Pinacotecat do Estado de Sao Paulo (2012), with the naves he arranged in La Capella of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (MACBA, 2015), or with the labyrinth he articulated in the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD, 2018). Building within the building, continent as well as content, Bunga resizes the experience of a spectator who not only contemplates the work, but, in doing so, also integrates and transforms it.

The exhibition, organized by the Reina Sofia Museum, is his largest intervention in Madrid to date. His work has been exhibited in international museums and art centers such as the Serralves Museum in Porto (2012), the MUAC-UNAM University Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City (2013), the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2020) or the Vienna Secession (2021), among others.