The Brooklyn Rail

In a ca. 1984 photograph, artist Gyula Kosice peers out from a Plexiglas dome, wearing a space suit. Within the transparent cell, the artist folds in on himself, head nearly pressing the dome’s perforated surface. Cosplaying an astronaut, Kosice pantomimes the restrictions, porosity, and possibilities of space. Embodying his own idea of porvenirismo, “the almost here,” Kosice handles space “not as empty but autonomous.” Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) curator Mari Carmen Ramírez describes the embodiment more fully as an “entity that is tactile, malleable, and just as material as sculpture itself.”

The MFAH’s exhibition Intergalactic draws upon all corners of Kosice’s cosmic vision, featuring more than eighty pieces from 1950 to 1980 that range from plastic sculptures to neon and “hydrolight” reliefs. It is the first US survey of this prominent yet underrecognized artist, writer, and theorist who pioneered hydrokinetic art. A collaboration with the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), the exhibition spans two sites across the MFAH campus. Three rooms feature the interplay of water, light, space, and transparency. A separate permanent exhibition showcases Kosice’s plan for man’s escape from Earth, The Hydrospatial City, a network of airborne modules for intellectual and creative survival that would sit 1,000–1,500 meters above the ocean, fueled from cloud mist.

An acrylic mobile of half domes suspended within a dark room, The Hydrospatial City is arresting. Each mobile contains a diorama of future living complete with miniature inhabitants. Behind this rendering of the celestial commune hang shimmering oceanic lightscapes reminiscent of morning sun on the surface of water. The Hydrospatial City was born of Kosice’s disgust with Le Corbusier’s Functional City, which reduced life to four zones: dwelling, transportation, work, and leisure. In response to these “dormitory cities,” as Kosice called them, he developed his hidrorevolución in the clouds, a society in constant circulation, powered by water vapor. Citizens select the transparent bubble-like units where they want to live and connect these spaces to other homes. In Kosice’s memorias descriptivas, he floods the architectural document, typically used to compose construction notes, with poetry. Instead of a living room, a “place for forgetting oblivion. Annex for free memories.” In lieu of a kitchen, “a place for the sheltering of women’s dreams,” or “place for dismissing anguish.” A Marxist vision that upends notions of private property, urban alienation, and political repression, the development of Kosice’s communal speculative city is bookended by WWII, the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, and two Argentinian military juntas. Conceiving this project in the midst of human cruelty (another memoria: a place “to verify the crumbling of experience.”), Kosice predicted the inevitability of mankind to forsake each other, destroy the planet, and be forced to reconvene in outer space to learn how to love each other again. Through this speculative architecture, he offers a promise, a remedy, an escape.

Kosice created The Hydrospatial City when plastic was king, representing not environmental harm but change, empowerment, even sex. Think Star Trek, designer André Courrèges’s 1964 “Moon Girl” collection, Jane Fonda as Barbarella. Silver go-go boots, helmet hat, stun gun. Intergalactic features forests of illuminated acrylic columns, mosaics of neon, water-riddled Plexiglas powered by motors—tools for an otherworldly alchemist. A founding member of Madí, a Concrete art movement based in Buenos Aires, Kosice’s pieces like Tríada (1960), a hot pink and tangerine light box that looks like a futuristic organ, reveal the group’s spirit of invention and experimentation, function and play.

Kosice was as much a man of earthly folly as he was futurity and spatial innovation. A skilled self-promoter, Kosice leveraged his social relationships to sell jewelry, opening Casa de Agua, a retail space in the affluent Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires. He was featured in magazines like France-Soir and La Mañana. Intergalactic’s catalogue includes photographs of Kosice posing with his hydroplastic works, sometimes in the nude. “I don’t know why I shouldn’t appear almost naked in a photo,” Kosice justified. “People have the right to know the artist.” “Maybe he saw nudity as just another form of transparency,” MALBA curator María Amalia García speculates. The erotics of water is visible in Homage to Diyi (1965), dedicated to Kosice’s wife, the overlooked yet influential artist Diyi Laañ. Two half transparent cylinders are connected by a steady flow of water, one continually refilling and emptying the other.

Kosice crossed the Atlantic at the age of four, stepping into a new national identity in Argentina. “All I remember of that journey is water” Kosice said in 2012. “For days and days, all I could see was water and the wake left behind, the wake and the water.” No wonder Kosice grasped for a creative form that reflected this undulation, using light, plastic, and water to create a sculpture, as critic Clement Greenberg put it, “released from mass and solidity.” Kosice’s “Gotas” series utilizes light and water’s constant motion to create a constellation of gyrating droplets that evoke deep space. These jeweled objects of wonder are powered by motions, evoking a hum and slightly sulfuric smell. Involving our senses, Kosice creates a portal into a new dimension for the viewer, a container of experience at once otherworldly and profoundly human that we are seduced into by, as Kosice wrote in a 1960 manifesto, an element that “slips through your fingers.”

In 1982, Kosice presented The Hydrospatial City to NASA engineers. They dismissed it, not for its technical viability but for its cost. Still, Kosice persevered. “Those who do not believe in its feasibility,” Kosice said of the project, “are still bound to the cave and the nest, to wars and floods.” Beyond an artist, Gyula Kosice was an arbiter of el porvenir. His practice moved past the bounds of aesthetics to invention, to utopian futures and interplanetary life. Kosice understood the necessity of art to create new societies, earthbound or otherwise.