Carlos Bunga (born 1976) is a Portuguese artist. He is known for his installations out of mass-produced materials, like cardboard, duct tape and home paint, questioning architecture as a language of power and other inertias related to it, like order and solidity.
Carlos Bunga was born in 1976 in Porto, where he lived with his mother and siblings. In 1978, they were transferred to the old prison of Forte de Peniche, transformed in a center to receive refugees, where they lived for five years until moved to official protection housing in the same area.
In 1998, at 23 years old, he started his fine arts studies at the Escola Superior de Artes e Design de Caldas da Rainha. In 2003 he won the EDP Novos Artistas prize of Serralves and in 2004 he participated in Manifesta 5 in San Sebastián, Spain, which was his first international exhibition.
He lives and works in Barcelona.
Bunga's interest towards plastic arts starts with painting while being a student at the faculty of Fine Arts. "Paint is directly or indirectly present in all my works. It's my thoughts' basis, a multifaceted place, filled with layers, perspectives and smells", he said. Since the beginnings, he works painting in its expanded version, which allows him to create polychromatic and wrapping environments where paintÃÂ is experimented with the body.ÃÂ ÃÂ
The site-specific installations stem from the direct experience with the workspace. As a predetermined project doesn't exist â nothing is designed or previously planned to be built â the artworks are a result of the confrontation and the dialogue with the architecture where he situates them, and he builds transitory and precarious architecture out of humble materials that create a fiction with the preexistent architecture, altering circulation and the specific interiorsâ perception.
Chus MartÃÂnez says:
<blockquote>Each new artwork feeds from the previous one, reincorporates old textures, rethinks chromatisms, reformulates scale, etc., each new site-specific has a dialogic relationship with its previous artworks. So each new project orients us towards a problem that stays during its whole practice: like new life is possible.</blockquote>
In several occasions, the installations present themselves as an architecture that defies another one, that fragments it to see it again. Once these projects are finished, they give way to the set of drawings that come up like a search of conceptual possibilities and of overcoming the space's formal and spacial restrictions. They are the post-projects' notebooks.
Bunga, influenced during his career's beginnings by the Grupo Gutai, often makes interventions on his site-specific installations, accelerating the piece's transformation or decaying process and accentuating the contrast and tension between the construction process, that tends to last around two or three weeks, and the transformation process, that lasts less than an hour. His work is based on a complex time system, oscillating between altered temporalities and sudden accelerations. By speeding up his constructionsâ life cycle, Bunga emphasizes architecture's fragility and unstableness, that at the same time functions as a metaphor for life itself. Many of his worksâ ephemeral character and his construction's unveiled fragility immediately provoke evocations of a literary nature and associations with issues related to urban and social landscapes.
The models series titled Untitled. Model (2002) are Bunga's first works where he explores his interest on architecture; quickly he starts having a problematic relationship with these impossible architectures and he starts playing with their scale to be able to achieve this models on a 1:1 scale â human scaled models, built like paintings, as three-dimensional installations of visual ideas. Bunga also makes interventions on domestic furniture, creating a different link with these two realities. In other more recent works, objects become elements from our imagination, like the Casulhos (2017)àmade in ceramic or cardboard, in which he manifests again his interest on the telluric transformation idea
Bunga had his first individual exhibition in the art gallery GalerÃÂa Elba BenÃÂtez in Madrid (2005). In 2007, his work is included in the exhibition Unmonumental in the New Museum in New York, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Richard Flood and Laura Hoptman.àIn 2009, the Miami Art Museum presented his first exhibition in an American museum, and he later has projects in the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2011) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2018),àamong others. He also participates in Latin museums, like theàPinacoteca de São Paulo (2012) and the Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2015).
He has also had numerous individual exhibitions in European museums, like the Fundación Serralves in Porto (2012), Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich (2015), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona, MACBA (2015), Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia in Lisbon â where his work was object for an exhaustive study for the exhibition curated by Iwona Blazwick âÂÂ, Whitechapel in London (2020), Secession in Vienna (2021), Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt (2022) and the Palacio de Cristal, Museo Centro de Arte Reina SofÃÂa de Madrid (2022)
He participates in many group exhibitions. Among them, the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2015), the Bienal de São Paulo (2010) and Manifesta 5 (2004).
Since the beginnings of his career, he had several international residencies, including: The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Ireland (2022); The Watermill Center in Watermill (2017); MOCA Tucson (2014); International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York (2006); Helsinki International artist in Residence Program, HIAP, Helsinki (2005) and Aldaba Art México (2007).