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Contact: Stacey Czar, Public Relations Director
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An opening reception celebrates the new work Friday, November 9 at 7 pm.

On view November 10, 2007 - Fall 2008

CINCINNATI -- Visitors to the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) can observe real-time art making as Odili Donald Odita begins the captivating process of transforming Kaplan Hall, CAC's lobby with FLOW, his new, site-specific wall painting beginning October 10. The exhibition opens Saturday, November 10 and remains on view through Fall 2008. The installation is sponsored by the Dr. Stanley & Mickey Kaplan Foundation.

CAC's Alice & Harris Weston Director and Chief Curator Raphaela Platow encourages visitors to observe the creation of the wall painting in real-time. "One of the most exciting aspects of contemporary art is that it is happening right now. We want to invite people into the creative process, allowing our audiences to experience it first-hand," she says.

Curated by Platow in her first exhibition as Director and Chief Curator, with Maiza Hixson, Curatorial Assistant, FLOW will create a dynamic landscape of vivid colors reacting to the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art. The CAC building was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Zaha Hadid. "Coming into the space, I felt very energized by the design and the architecture," Odita says. "What I responded to in the space was the energy of being inside and outside at the same time."

Hadid envisioned the lobby to function as a public square: "The lobby of the Center should become one of the most inviting public spaces in Cincinnati. During the day, it should be a kind of public square - an open, daylit, 'landscaped' expanse that should be viewed as an artificial park," she said. "The site is at an axis of considerable pedestrian presence. It was our wish to exploit and incorporate the main flows: from Walnut Street, from the Plaza on East Sixth and Walnut, and more distantly from Fountain Square."

Odita's open-process installation allows visitor exploration of the mystery behind contemporary art and demonstrates the transformative power of art in action. Passers-by and visitors will each have the opportunity to experience the work, whether or not they enter the space. The impulse to invite public observation of Odita's installation emerges from Platow's vision to use Hadid's intent for the lobby to function as an inviting public square and an intention to facilitate creative interaction between the CAC, art and the public.

In describing his work and inspiration, Odita refers to the land of his ancestry. "My paintings are often called internal geographies… In a sense they are my internalization of Africa and the landscape space that I was born in but haven't lived in a large part of my life."

Odita's wide, angular bands of bold, vibrant color intersecting at varying degrees and angles create vivid abstractions that resonate with colors of a wide color palette, resembling both landscapes and African textiles. Evocative of Modern and minimal traditions, his geometric forms recollect Sol LeWitt. FLOW coincides with an exhibition of LeWitt's work at CAC beginning February 23, 2008. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore connections between the two artists in March when Odita returns to the CAC to give an illustrated presentation of his work, providing insight into the many visual and conceptual resonances with the work of LeWitt.

Curator, critic and artist Robert Storr, director of the 52nd International Art Exhibition Think with the Senses - Feel with the Mind -- Art in the Present Tense 2007 Venice Biennale wrote, "Using earth tones and complex interlocking geometries alien to the Constructivist model his paintings might otherwise evoke, and while breaking out of the confines of the canvas and onto the wall in a manner that Sol Lewitt and other Minimal artists could appreciate, Odili Donald Odita has set about rejuvenating abstraction 100 years after its invention, and in the process swept aside the debate over the African influences on Cubism and Expressionism by making contemporary African abstraction in a culturally syncretic idiom all his own."

Odili Donald Odita was born in Enugu, Nigeria. He lives and works in Philadelphia. Odita earned a B.F.A. with Distinction in 1988 from Ohio State University, and an M.F.A. in 1990 from Bennington College, Vermont. Odita is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia.

FLOW will be on view in Kaplan Hall through Fall, 2008. Odita will be installing Thursdays through Saturdays throughout October.

Images:

Odili Donald Odita, Give Me Shelter, 2007, acrylic latex wall paint, colored pigment on wall, in the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, curated by Robert Storr, 708.66 x 711.02 x 236.61 inches, courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; with support of The International Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo credit: Giovanni Pancino.

Odili Donald Odita, at the Contemporary Arts Center's Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, courtesy of CAC, ©2007