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A detail view of literary texts within a dessert terrain diorama, from Gonzalez-Foerster’s exhibition at the Hispanic Society of America.  Via Dia Art Foundation.

Currently showing at the Hispanic Society of America is an exhibition by Paris and Rio de Janeiro based artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.  The show, which  functions as a kind of expansion of the society’s renowned research library,  consists of a range of twentieth-century literature installed in a series of three dioramas, by reference to their place of origin. The various texts, written by some 40 authors, hail from three distinct geographical regions: the dessert, the tropics and the North Atlantic. Entitled “chronotopes and dioramas,” the site-specific project is the third in a series of contemporary art exhibitions commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation for the Hispanic Society of America, which rests in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Organized by the Dia Art Foundation’s curator at large, Lynne Cooke, the exhibition marks Gonzalez-Foerster’s first major solo show in the United States.

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An installation view of one of Gonzalez-Foerster’s modeled oceanic terrains, (2009) Via Dia Foundation. “I always wanted to be a writer, but writing is very difficult for me,” the artist has said. “Slowly I accepted the idea of a kind of expanded literature, you might say.”

More images, text and related links after the jump….

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