RECENT sculptures BY JOHAN CRETEN: on view At the Bass Museum of Art beginning june 7

MIAMI BEACH - (May 30, 2003) - This summer, the Bass Museum of Art presents the first solo exhibition in an American museum of Flemish sculptor Johan Creten. Twenty-seven new works in clay, bronze, and plaster created in Creten's Miami studio will fill the grand Gertrude Silverstone Muss Gallery on the second floor of the new Isozaki wing, demonstrating the artist's consistent technical brilliance and a deep spiritual dimension. From rose-petal covered torsos to more recent large-scale pieces glazed in glossy, multi-colored shimmer, Creten's work embodies dichotomies, at once inviting and forbidding, delicate and robust.
Born in Belgium on July 25, 1963, Creten was educated in Gent, in Paris at the Académie des Beaux Arts, and in Amsterdam. He has traveled extensively, creating and showing his work in Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, and New York, among other cities. In 1996 he received the Rome Prize and spent two years at the famous Villa Médici. His work has also been exhibited at the Fifth International Istanbul Biennial and was the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva, Switzerland.
Creten has been the Bass Museum of Art's artist-in-residence since 2001, during that time producing work in a studio in Miami's Design District. A particularly striking body of work for which he is known, Odore di Femmina, consists of female torsos covered in ceramic rose petals. These sculptures emphasize clay not so much as a material but as a vehicle for metaphorical and political associations as well as for its conceptual complexity.
(Bass Museum, 2003)