MIAMI, FLORIDA.- Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt are a Miami-based architect/artist team who collaborate to create work that moves between painting, public art, architecture, and urbanism. Their art works propose encounters between stories and spaces, navigating the areas between the intimate and the monumental, the mundane and the fantastic. New Work: Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt is on view at Miami Art Museum February 28-June 22, 2003. Organized by Miami Art Museum and curated by Peter Boswell, assistant director for programs/senior curator.
Behar and Marquardt, who were born and educated in Argentina, have been living in Miami since 1985. They both received diplomas in architecture from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in Argentina, with Rosario holding an additional degree in puppet theater direction. Behar completed his post-graduate studies at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York and currently teaches at the University of Miami. As a collaborative team, they have lectured in the United States, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, and Belgium.
For their New Work exhibition at MAM, Behar and Marquardt have modified the museum’s gallery so that it evokes a public space at night, lit by festive strands of colored lights. An enormous house of cards enveloped by a wooden scaffold stands in the middle of the gallery; it is unclear whether the house is in the process of construction or collapse.
The installations, paintings, and photographs of Behar and Marquardt have been exhibited in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Their most visible works include such public art projects as the giant red M (1996) at the Riverwalk Metromover stop in downtown Miami; the murals on canvas that adorn the eastern and western facades of the Buick building in Miami’s Design District (2000); and The Living Room (2001) at the corner of North Miami Avenue and 40th Street, also in the Design District. Recently, they were commissioned to decorate Fairchild Tropical Garden’s new Visitor’s Centers’ ballroom (2002).
