Cildo Meireles

Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles (b 1948) has made some of the most philosophically brilliant, politically telling and aesthetically seductive works in recent art. An important theme in the Brazilian post-war avant-garde, from which Meireles emerged at the end of the 1960s, was the relationship between the sensual and the cerebral, the body and the mind. Meireles, now acknowledged as a key instigator of conceptual art, has remained true to these concerns, and to a political and ethical viewpoint formed outside the 'cultures of plenty'. At the same time he has become a global artist, making work that deals with issues and experiences that affect us all, whatever our country of origin.Under the repressive military regime of the late 1960s and early 1970s which controlled the media, Meireles found different ways of reaching the public, stamping bank-notes with seditious slogans and returning them into circulation or stencilling Coke bottles with slogans before sending them back to the bottling plant (Insertion into Ideological Circuits). Other works play with the sense of space or scale, varying in size from that of a ringer-ring to an installation covering 225 metres.
His installations are always designed to heighten the awareness of his audience, sometimes by inducing fear, as in Volatile, (1980/94) which includes the presence of a naked candle and the smell of natural gas.Fontes (1992), consists of a small room converted into a labyrinth by the suspension of hundreds of identical rulers from its ceiling, mounting hundreds of clocks around its perimeter and covering its floor with hundreds of tiny plastic numbers, so that movement is restricted by the instruments of measurement of time and space. Babel (2001) is a contemporary take on the myth of the tower that confounded the world's languages.Lavishly illustrated this book will provide an invaluable guide to the work and ideas of this important international artist.