Who is Cildo Meireles?

Cildo Meireles is a conceptual artist born in 1948 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He live and works in Brazil. His work often explores scale, ranging from a tiny cube the size of a fingernail in his piece Southern Cross, to large scale installations which fill entire rooms. Another key element of his work is the use of participation, which is often central to the idea behind the piece:

This term refers to an area of art where the artist places a greater importance on exploring an idea, or concept, than the artwork itself. Therefore, often, the piece is secondary to the process or performance which creates it. Find out more about Conceptual Art

 For Meireles the existence of conceptual art was particularly important due to the poverty and precarious situation in Brazil:

Red Shift is a piece which spans three rooms. The first room, entitled Impregnation, could be someone’s living room, yet everything except the white walls, is red:

The second room, Entorno, shows a tiny bottle which has spilt an impossibly large quantity of red liquid over the floor. The third room, Shift, consists of a running tap which gushes out red water.

During his solo exhibition at Tate in 2008 Meireles recreated an ongoing project of his named Meshes of Freedom. The artwork relies on the participation of the audience to join the intersecting pieces. Watch the video to discover more about the piece.

In 2014, Tate Liverpool’s Art Turning Left exhibition showcased Meireles’ piece Insertions into Ideological Circuits, a collection of Coca-Cola bottles which began in 1970. Although unremarkable when empty, when they are filled with the brown liquid political phrases such as Yankees Go Home’, or instructions for how to make a ‘Molotov cocktail’ appear. After use the glass bottles would be returned to Coca-Cola, recycled and then returned into circulation. This meant the work would be seen by unsuspecting customers across the world.

Meireles saw the cola bottles as an opportunity to subvert capitalism- in particular the influence of American brands entering Brazil around that time. This Insertion was one of a series which also included adding slogans to banknotes.

Meireles felt it was important that the work was anonymous, lacked ownership and required participation through the act of circulating the items.