Alexandre Arrechea's NO LIMITS Set for Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival

The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust presents the monumental sculptural installation No Limits by Cuban-born artist Alexandre Arrechea as part of the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival public art program. Four nearly 20-foot-tall sculptures-originally part of a series installed along New York City's Park Avenue-will be displayed throughout downtown Pittsburgh's Gateway Center from June 6-September 7, 2014.

Arrechea's No Limits is series of ten large-scale sculptures representing iconic New York City buildings that plays on the idea of elastic architecture as a metaphor for the challenges and opportunities of shifting conditions and new realities. Through his art, Arrechea entices the viewer to explore his or her own role in such concepts as control, power, and surveillance.

The buildings portrayed in No Limits are twisted, turned, and rotated, and are fused to spinning tops, or tompos (toy tops popular in Latin America), resulting in the idea of a building in perpetual motion-a building that can continuously spin, fall, or rise again.

"With this installation, I have created a set of works that confront dynamism vs. static, the whole vs. the fragmented, control vs. chaos, utopia vs. reality," says artist Alexandre Arrechea. "The series provides a new point of access from which to understand the dialog between art and architecture and how this relationship can evolve and open new doors."

"We are thrilled to present a selection of sculptures form Alexandre Arrechea's No Limits series," says Veronica Corpuz, Director of Festival Management and Special Projects, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. "We hope that festivalgoers will see the dynamic sculptures in relation to their own city and relate the artworks to their surroundings."

Alexandre Arrechea (born Trinidad, Cuba, 1970) graduated from Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana, Cuba, in 1994. He was a founding member of the collective Los Carpinteros (1991-2003). As a solo artist, Arrechea represented his homeland in the first ever Cuban Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011), as well as the 11th Havana Biennial (2012). Arrechea was the spring 2011 BAMbill cover artist as well as featured in "Hola Havana" for the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of ¡Si Cuba! Festival (2011). A key source for this work is the prominence of surveillance systems and the accompanying obsession with control during our time. Works such as the Garden of Mistrust (2003-2005) and Perpetual Free Entrance (2006) deal with troubles of accessibility or approach to artwork. An installation he created for the 2009 Havana Biennial consisted of a steel house divided into eleven sections, the separation between walls changing daily, depending of the rise or fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In March 2010, Arrechea was chosen to create a public art program in New York City's Times Square. The video work Black Sun (2009) was a 3-D animated wrecking ball that continuously hit the NASDAQ Billboard. Arrechea's work is ultimately a provocative exercise of criticisms to the known structures of power in our time.