"Mexico is truly the promised land for abstract art." Anni & Josef Albers, 1936 “Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world.” Andre Breton, 1938 Why Mexico? It was not only that Mexico was nearby and easily accessible to U.S.–based artists, although that was certainly true. And it was not just that Mexico had powerful ancient arts that were alien and mysterious to the Euro-American...
“The artist comes first,” says Marika Wachtmeister, referring to the core philosophy of Wanås, one of the most remarkable contemporary art venues in the world, which she founded in 1987. Located in southern Sweden, Wanås is unlike anywhere else . . .
The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach calls itself, “The only museum in the United States exclusively dedicated to modern and contemporary Latin American art.” Yet its permanent collection is comprised largely of works from Mexico, with exhibitions often featuring art from that country. Idurre Alonso, curator there since 2002, talks about the “aestheticism” of contemporary Mexican art...
Throughout his 1982 book All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman returns over and over to a single passage from Marx’s Communist Manifesto: All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is...
In the 20th century there has long been a long tradition of artists extending their visions beyond the studio walls to encompass a wider range of ideas and modes of thinking, wherein artists like Wallace Berman with his magazine Semina in the ’60s, or much later in the mid-’90s, Daniel Joseph Martinez with the nonprofit space Deep River, could extend their minds in idiosyncratic ways toward a...
Meeting Marycarmen Arroyo Macias in MexiCali was a fortuitous event; she lent me her camera in a pinch to photograph potential performance locations for the MexiCali Biennial 13, in which we were both included. When I asked about her work for the show, she told me the museum was concerned about her plan to install raw meat in the gallery, for fear it would attract rodents and insects. It wasn’t...
Geographical border zones figure prominently in the work of Julio César Morales, particularly those separating the U.S., where he lives, from Mexico, where he was born. In “Undocumented Interventions,” an ongoing series of watercolor and ink drawings, Morales presents a surrealist view of clandestine border crossings, in which piñatas shaped like Barney and SpongeBob Square Pants conceal the...
Heaven’s gate doesn’t separate life and death like the U.S.-Mexican border. And if the rhetoric and rifles weren’t forcibly obvious symbols, the new pedestrian crossing from San Ysidro into Tijuana is unambiguously penal. A cattle stockade. While the debate over the fence rampages 2600 miles away, Tijuana residents have taken to the fence itself to illegally add their voices. In two main...
Yoshua Okón came to prominence in the blossoming Mexico City art scene of the 1990s. In partnership with Miguel Calderón, another rising star of Mexican art, they founded La Panadería, an artist’s residency and gallery space in a four-story building and former bakery in the then newly fashionable neighborhood of Hipódromo Condesa. After the closure of La Panadería Okón continued his studies at...
Photo by Leonard Nadel, 1956 “Bracero workers being fumigated at border town Hidalgo, Texas”, Courtesy Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History
Already known for planting her cut-out shapes onto a dense matte black ground, which she has characterized as ‘non-space,’ for this show, Kent challenges viewers straight off with a plunge into a black field already seemingly torn away to reveal both apparent voids...
Central Valley ceramicist David Hicks doesn’t have a big footprint in Los Angeles. To see his work, you have to drive out to a hospital in Sylmar: a sun-parched, semi-rustic neighborhood at the northernmost tip of Los Angeles. There, above the lobby welcome desk, once...
Poetic, internal, observational and mysterious—all describe Tristan Espinoza’s “Index, Interiors,” currently on display at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery. Both inscrutable and mesmerizing, Espinoza’s work uses the mediums of hand-made cyanotypes and AI, a...
These new paintings by Jessie Makinson are absolutely wild. From large-scale soiree tableaux to small-gathering social vignettes and intimate, symbolism-rich character portraits, her singular swirl of posh post-male society is both feral and fancy, cheeky and courtly,...
A painting requires nothing more than a painter. Everything else is malleable. Once a painter has been established, that which they create are paintings no matter the form. Michael Henry Hayden is – as he has been throughout his long career – a painter. But in the...
“The Grief I Have Caused You” is Devendra Banhart’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Nicodim is hosting the exhibition in their upstairs gallery, which surveys work made during the lockdown and beyond. The past year has been one of great suffering and...
The atmosphere is quiet and still, the lighting theatrical and in a sequence of different colored rooms, case after display case filled with ceramic vessel-like forms resting at the bottom of brightly lit aquariums exude immobility, enlivened only by fish darting...
In the 1950s-60s, Jasper Johns created two works – Flag (1954-55) and Target (1961) – which both carved his place in the art historical canon and established a new conceptual framework for art. These encaustic versions of instantly recognizable icons (an American Flag...
A Google search for teacup reveals delicate fluted cups and saucers, many decorated with floral patterns. The association is afternoon tea in England, a formal spread with snacks and fine china. The sources for Robert Russell's "Teacups" paintings are random...
The artistic process is often private. Artists seldom actively show the steps taken to craft an end product, but to some, like Ludovica Gioscia, revealing all is vital to their work. In a large, multi-faceted installation at Baert Gallery entitled Arturo and The...