Amalia Pica accompanies the Argentinean-born, London-based artist’s first major solo museum exhibition in the United States. The fourth volume in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s Monographs series, the catalogue features essays by Ana Teixeira Pinto and Tirdad Zolghadr and an interview with the artist and co-curators João Ribas and Julie Rodrigues Widholm.

Through drawings, sculptures, large-scale photographic prints, slide projections, live performances, and installations, Pica explores metaphor, communication, and civic participation. Using simple materials such as photocopies, lightbulbs, drinking glasses, beer bottles, bunting, and cardboard, she creates work that is both formally beautiful and conceptually rigorous. Pica is particularly interested in the limits and failures of language and human communication and the ways in which thought translates to action, idea to object. Her work is optimistic in its reflection of moments of shared experience, often incorporating signifiers of celebration and communal gatherings such as fiesta lights, flags, banners, and confetti.

Published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago with MIT List Visual Arts Center and ARTBOOK | D.A.P. Radius-cut board cover with PVC dust jacket, 112 pages. 8 x 10 in.

Detail Amalia Pica. Venn Diagrams (Under the Spotlight), 2011. Spotlights and motion sensors, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.