The Museum of Modern Art to Present First Major Retrospective 

of Congolese Artist Bodys Isek Kingelez

NEW YORK, October 3, 2017—Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948–2015), the Congolese sculptor who worked with paper, commercial packaging, and materials from everyday life to create what he called “extreme maquettes” that encompass civic buildings, public monuments, and private pavilions. On view from May 26 through October 21, 2018, Bodys Isek Kingelez will span Kingelez’s career over a 25-year period, ranging from early works that were included in the landmark 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Pompidou, to his streamlined, dramatic forms of the 2000s. The first retrospective of Kingelez’s work and the first substantial monographic presentation of his work in the US, this exhibition will feature works from each of the key periods of his career, from early single-building sculptures, to spectacular sprawling cities, to futuristic late works, which incorporate increasingly unorthodox materials. Kingelez was previously featured in the MoMA exhibition Projects 59: Architecture as Metaphor (1997). Although his work has long been featured in major international exhibitions, this will be the first opportunity in New York to explore the full breadth of his career. Bodys Isek Kingelez is organized by Sarah Suzuki, Curator, with Hillary Reder, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art.

Accompanied by a scholarly catalogue with texts by Suzuki and architect David Adjaye, among others, the exhibition will unfold as a chronological display with a thematic approach, bringing together works made during the artist’s first trip to Paris in 1989, civic structures, public monuments, and fantastic takes on geographically-specific architectural tropes. The installation will capture his transition from single buildings to entire metropoles, and it will culminate with a selection of Kingelez’s large-scale cities marked by soaring forms that characterize much of his late production. The exhibition will bring together rarely seen works from both public and private collections, including The Contemporary African Art Collection (CAAC—The Pigozzi Collection), Geneva; The Museum of Everything, London; and Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris. Special thanks to the artist Carsten Höller (German, born 1961), who is developing a visitor experience project in parallel with the exhibition.