Armando Andrade Tudela

‘Utopias have religious functions and they can also sometimes be mechanisms of political mobilization. But politically they tend to rebound. For utopias are breeders of illusions and therefore, inevitably, of disillusions.’

— Immanuel Wallerstein

Counter Gallery are pleased to announce Armando Andrade Tudela’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. For his show, the artist will present a large architectural sculpture INKA SNOW (2006), as well as a related a series of drawings, photographs, prints and a book.

INKA SNOW is an architectural model of an imagined communal housing project. It revisits the utopian and at times hedonistic experimental practices of collective living models of the 1960s and 1970s. A series of linear forms, alluding to chopped lines of cocaine, compose the primary structure and are set into a mountainous landscape of snow. Whilst INKA SNOW revisits the utopian aspirations of communal living, these habitable drug lines are spaces infused with excess and transgression, pointing towards an inexorable decline of ideological aspirations.

INKA SNOW is an extension of the artist’s ongoing research practice into forms of Tropical Modernism. In previous works, like CAMION (2004), his series of Billboard Photographs (2004-5) and Fragmentos de Escultura (2005), the artist has recombined existing and imagined forms out of a growing interest in local manifestations of the informal that occur on the precarious boundary between the historic and the new. With Inka Snow the topology of the architecture and the landscape are so close as to suggest a potential further collapse between nature and its manipulation, with the whole project being lost beneath a blizzard of snow. Anecdotally perhaps, the linear forms of Tudela’s sculpture find a parallel in the Pre-Columbians Nazca Lines in Perú which themselves are being overwritten by new marks left by trucks crossing these ancient forms to save gas and money.

Armando Andrade Tudela (b.1975 Lima,Perú) studied at the Royal College of Art, London (2001-3) and completed his research fellowship at the Jan Van Eyk Akademie, Maastricht (2003-5). In 2005 Tudela participated in the following group exhibitions T1 – Torino Triennale, Castello di Rivoli, Turin and FARSITES, InSite 05, San Diego and Tijuana. He will be participating in the 27th Sao Paulo Biennial in October 2006. Solo exhibitions include Counter Gallery, 2004 and forthcoming LAXART, Los Angeles in 2007. His work is held by public collections including the Tate.