Tembusu College Fellow’s Tea

Mr. David Medalla

4pm, Thursday

3^rd November 2011

Master’s Common Lounge,

Level 3, Residential Block

Refreshments will be served.

Only 30 seats available!

Please register at tembusu.nus.edu.sg

David Medalla is constantly shifting his strategies and media; when one thinks one has him pinned down as a situationist, a surrealist, or a conceptualist, one is stumped as he continues to endlessly conceive other fantastic, often unrealisable schemes. Fairly unknown to the forefront, he is an icon of an artist who has made no clear distinction between his art and his life. David Medalla’s work stretches back to the sixties when he co-founded Signals Gallery in London and presented international kinetic art, among other art forms. He initiated the “Exploding Galaxies” which mediated relationships between international artists and was a pioneer in participatory art, his work highly resonated with (was highly influential in) the works of Conceptual artists from Brazil (Tropicália/Tropicalismo movement with Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica) the Exploding Galaxies.

Aside from his deeply rooted underground core work on the avant-garde scene of London, he became increasingly known for a series of works he did entitled, “Cloud Canyons”: thick bubbles that slowly come from a central machine which produces random shapes that glisten like rainbows when perceived by light. His work was included in Harald Szeemann’s exhibition ‘Weiss auf Weiss’ (1966) and ‘Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form’ (1969) and in the DOCUMENTA 5 exhibition in 1972 in Kassel. Marcel Duchamp honoured him with a ‘medallic’ object, as a tribute to his name. In 1997, he was a DAAD artist in Berlin. Very recently, he has exhibited at the New Museum in New York where the curator hailed his “Cloud Canyons No. 14” as an iconic sculpture in Contemporary Art.

To view Medalla’s works, see:
Mousse Magazine
Veneer Magazine