Cildo Meireles

Cildo Meireles is one of the leaders in the international development of Conceptual art,and this Brazilian artist has made some of the most politically telling, aesthetically seductive and philosophically intriguing works in recent art.

His objects and atmospheric installations from the late 1960s onwards never fail to surprise, ranging in scale from a tiny work in the form of a finger-ring to a vast installation covering 225m². Composed of familiar everyday objects, yet accumulated in forms that we never imagined before, such as the all-red living room of Red Shift 1967–84, or the massive tower of radios of Babel 2001, Meireles's works lead us from an initial feeling of amazement to a deeper level of engagement. Eight of these great installations are on display here simultaneously for the first time, including the labyrinthine Through 1983–9, and Volatile 1980–94, a multi-sensory environment that plays with our response to danger, real or imagined.

The exhibition also includes his celebrated Insertions into Ideological Circuits 1970, by which he devised a method to disseminate messages of protest under the military dictatorship in Brazil. This is Meireles's first major retrospective in the UK and it presents a powerful and intriguing tour of his most memorable works.