The Luckman Gallery was pleased to present new work by Los Angeles-based artist Carlos Mollura in his first solo exhibition in nearly a decade.

For this exhibition Mollura will feature a new installation of industrial plastic inflatables that respond to and occupy the entire gallery space, a combination of both architecture and interventionist sculpture.

Born in Argentina, Mollura’s entrepreneurial father immigrated to the United States with his family to escape the dictatorship of Juan Peron and to seek prosperity. His father became an innovator in the waterbed industry and continues to hold numerous patents pertaining to waterbed technology and fabrication. Plastic fabrication has had an undeniable influence on Mollura’s own vision as a sculptor and directly inspires this body of new work.

Mollura succinctly describes his new work as “Ancient Sumerians, punk rock, waterbed culture, capitalism and Apocalypse Now all cooked in a stew”.  Commanding the main the space, Hierarchical Waterbed Ziggurat is an oversized inflatable transparent ziggurat-like monument that proposes parallels to ancient Mesopotamia. An early architectural phenomena, equivalent in grandeur to the ancient pyramids, the ziggurat became a sign of human enterprise and power. Further, the Assyrians, an ethnic group living amongst ziggurats, are credited for making the first waterbeds out of goat bladders during the Mesopotamian period.

Another work, Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure, references Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and a famously improvised line of dialogue by Marlon Brando’s character Colonel Kurtz. Recounting the horrors he witnessed during one of his missions, Brando’s Colonel Kurtz gives a soliloquy about the genius and monstrosity of an enemy who severed the arms off of all the children who were recently inoculated with the polo virus. Mollura comically embodies this horror in the form of  a heap of inflatable severed arms piled on the gallery floor.

Carlos Mollura received his BFA from Otis/Parsons College of Art, Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; ACME, Los Angeles; L.A. Louver Gallery, Los Angeles; Sies + Hoke Galerie, Dusseldorf, Germany; and Institute for Contemporary Art, Vienna, Austria. Additionally, his work is included in numerous private and permanent collections, such as Creative Artist Agency (CCA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA).

The opening reception took place on Saturday, January 18, 2014