Fernado Arias

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present Cuarto Frio (Cooling Room), an installation by Fernando Arias, who lives and works in Bogota, Columbia. Arias' art conveys an attempt to bring awareness to HIV/AIDS as an issue, especially in the context of Latin America where it has to be approached in ways that are more metaphorical than literal. His work also considers the context of the art object and gallery.

Cuarto Frio is a 2 metre by 7 metre room consisting of metal walls and mesh ceiling. Within this room are twenty­ one suspended columns made from blood samples encased in laboratory glass and lit with black lights.

This work is both seductive in aesthetic and disturbing in content; it is meticulously constructed but reverberates between sensations of the clinic, the morgue and the sanctuary. It functions like a gallery inside the gallery, and upon entering Cuarto Frio, the viewer is placed in uncomfortable proximity to the virus as represented by the blood samples, and in turn art itself.

This will be the first North American exhibition of work by Fernando Arias. He has exhibited extensively in Latin America at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, Venezuela; the Museum of Modern Art, Bogota, Columbia; the Havana Biennial; the Museum of Arts, Guadalajara, Mexico; as well as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany; and Fotofeis, Edinburgh, Scotland.