Home

Oscar Tuazon
White Walls, 2019-

Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zurich | Courtesy the artist | Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

Oscar Tuazon

Collection

Steel, concrete, drywall, paint
Overall dimensions site-specific

I want to take a room and turn it into a sculpture. Make a sculpture of a room. I want to walk through a wall, make an opening in a wall. I took a wall and made a sculpture out of that, cut a hole through it, I cut a hole in the wall, I made a sculpture of a wall and walked through it. I’m not sure what that is, exactly, but it’s not architecture. An opening in a wall is a space you can walk through, a passage, for a moment you’re actually in a wall, passing through it, part of it. An opening is a way to walk through a wall. I made a sculpture of that opening and I walked through it.

A small space for one person; a room for a couple; a larger room, space for a small group of people. Above all, an empty space, waiting for something to happen. White Walls is a maze of spaces opening onto one another, a mirrored corridor of doors, a space formed by the movement of bodies passing through it. A door in the corner, a corner door. A door frame, a drawing on the floor. Not a real door, more like a sculpture of a door. A sculpture that walks through a wall.

To me the most exciting sculpture problem is to try and make something that remains unfinished, something without a precise physical form, a formless thing, incomplete, infinite, restless. In its original installation at the Boijmans Museum, the work was a series of five rooms, connected by nine passages, a particular configuration determined by a particular space. But doors open onto other spaces, other rooms, and there are dozens of possible configurations of the work. I think of White Walls that way: not as a specific arrangement of rooms but as a series of passages, doors opening onto other doors, never closed. –Oscar Tuazon

Oscar Tuazon (née Hansen) is an American artist based in Los Angeles who works in sculpture, architecture, and mixed media.
Oscar Tuazon was born Oscar Hansen on July 9, 1975, in a geodesic dome his parents built in the woods at Indianola, Kitsap County, Washington. He attended Deep Springs College, Cooper Union, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2001 he served as a founding board member at the Center for Urban Pedagogy in New York with his former Deep Springs classmate Damon Rich.

Professionally, he began his career working in the Studio Acconci of architect/artist Vito Acconci. After moving to Paris in 2007, he began exhibiting widely in Europe. He has since then exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, and many group and solo shows throughout the world, and is in major art collections such as Saatchi's.

This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.

RELATED PROGRAM