Wild Flowers, by Iván Argote: Katy Trail Art in partnership with the Dallas Museum of Art, located at Victory Overlook
Katy Trail Art presents Iván Argote’s Wild Flowers for the first time in outdoor public space to engage with visitors to the Katy Trail. Begun in 2021, Wild Flowers is an ongoing series of immersive installations comprised of scattered cast bronze fragments of a figurative statue. A torso, pelvis, hand, and feet are transformed into planters that hold local plants and flowers endemic to the region. Appearing as if nature has taken over and playing upon notions of monuments and time, the artist prompts the viewer to wonder if the statue is being removed, abandoned, or getting ready to be installed.
Over his career, Argote has continuously engaged with and appropriated public monuments—from performance interventions such as the mock removal in Paris of the statue of Joseph Gallieni, the French colonial administrator in Africa and Southeast Asia, to interactive installations such as the draping of Indigenous ponchos over statues of conquistadors and rulers in Bogotá, Madrid, and Los Angeles.
Suspended in the ambiguous space of becoming, Wild Flowers seeks not to define but animate public space, contemplation, and dialogue. Born and raised in Bogotá, Columbia and now living and working in Paris, Argote has been fascinated with the varied and changing perspectives around public space and with each new generation. As permanent monuments ironically stand in the sea of changing public opinion and social and historical contexts, he endeavors to reimagine the future possibilities and functions for public sculpture.
Raised on a tiered platform of cinder blocks, visitors to the Katy Trail are invited to take a rest and interact with the Wild Flowers installation of grandiose planters. Such elements of humor and play often permeates Argote’s work because they allow a space for dialogue and nuance especially around contentious topics. "Humor or affection can help us find a common ground,” says Argote. “It's all about generating empathy. Tenderness and humor are subversive in such a hard world." From the ruins of a monument can come new life, conversations, and meanings.
About the Artist: Iván Argote is a Colombian artist and filmmaker based in Paris. Through his sculptures, installations, films and interventions, he questions our relationship with others, power structures, and belief systems. He develops strategies based on tenderness, affect, and humor through which he generates critical approaches to dominant historical narratives.
Recent exhibitions include the 60th Venice Biennale “Foreigners Everywhere” in 2024, the Bruges Triennial in 2024, and his solo exhibitions “The Burden of the Invisible” at the SCAD Museum of Art in 2024 and “All Here Together” at Artpace in 2021. His work is included in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Centre Pompidou, among others, and he was nominated for the Centre Pompidou’s prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2022.