The Mexican conceptual artist Abraham Cruzvillegas is to follow in the footsteps of Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor and Ai Weiwei by taking on one of the most prestigious contemporary art commissions – filling Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.
Cruzvillegas is known for making sculptures from found material such as old furniture, bottles, bits of wood or feathers.
On Thursday Tate named him as the artist who will take on the inaugural Hyundai commission, opening to the public on 13 October this year. It was announced a year ago that Hyundai would support 11 years of Turbine Hall commissions in what is the Tate’s largest and longest sponsorship deal.
Chris Dercon, the director of Tate Modern, said he was delighted Cruzvillegas had accepted the task. “His work reflects Tate’s deep interest in showing truly ground-breaking international art,” he said.
During a residency at Cove Park in Scotland in 2008, Cruzvillegas gathered materials including wool, discarded fencing, a rubber buoy and an old coat hanger to create sculptures subsequently acquired by Tate Modern.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York owns a Cruzvillegas piece called Polaris made from an umbrella and pheasant and peacock feathers.
Cruzvillegas, who lives and works in Mexico City, creates his work under the title autocontrucción, or self-construction, which harks back to the way Mexicans of his parents’ generation would build their houses in the city, improvising with what they found.
The Turbine Hall commission, previously sponsored by Unilever, is always popular. It began in 2000 when Bourgeois installed an enormous spider and has been followed by installations such as Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, where each day hundreds of visitors would lie down and bask in the beautiful fake sunlight, and Carsten Höller’s enjoyable helter-skelter slides.
• The Hyundai commission is in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall from 13 October 2015 to 20 March 2016.
