December’s Gallery Guide packs an eye-full!
Museums, galleries, forums and, all kinds of spaces given over to personal realities, co-existing harmonies, and symbols as fertile as our collective culture. Besides a good handful of subjective entertainments, there are some essential tools for the stimulation of new sensitivities and new creativities. It’s important to remember to nourish yourself on ideas that ultimately transcend your own experience. Steal them, take them beyond their origins and then, make them your own.
The following is just a selection of the best exhibitions hanging through the at least the end of December.
Remedios Varo. Apuntes y anécdotas de una exposición (Notes and anecdotes of an exhibition)
Museo de Arte Moderno
Recreating a historian’s work, collecting and interpreting pieces of history from documents, testimonies and multiple studies by other researchers, this exhibition is like an open book. Revealing significant data for much of the work: provenances, works most recognized, and anecdotes, including comments from Varo herself and numerous others, even familiar paintings are seen in a new light. With 39 pieces from the MAM collection, as well as a chronology focused on the most curious information regarding the major themes associated with Varo’s short career, she is still one of the most prominent representatives of surrealism in Mexico.
Address: Av. Paseo de la Reforma y GandhiI s / n, Miguel Hidalgo, Bosque de Chapultepec I
Tacita Dean
Museo Tamayo
Through March, 2017
The first exhibition of Tacita Dean’s work in Mexico, The Tamayo hosts more than 90 representative pieces. A monolithic exhibition, the show includes multiple recent paintings, which aim to tell the better part of the story of her relevance, both as a painter and multi-media artist, as well as an insightful observer.
Address: Paseo de la Reforma 51, Bosque de Chapultepec
Barbara Kruger: Empatia (Empathy)
Line 2 and 8 metro Bellas Artes
Enough should be enough. Who owns what? Blind idealism is reactionary (with a cross in red). Terrifying (another cross in red). Mortal. All these are samples of the phrases and questions that from cover the walls, corridors, and ceilings at the Bellas Artes metro station. Kruger (born in Newark, New Jersey, 1945) has installed the work “Empathy,” with an aim toward “making suggestions as to how we behave toward one another.“
Niérika
Centro de la Imagen
Through March 27, 2017
10,000 slides, 800 sound reels, more than 20 hours of 16mm film, plus 35mm and Techniscope photography, vintage documents and tables of yarn corresponding to the work of the Lilly Archive. Through a single word, the wixárika can represent, like a mirror, the secret visions of an invisible world, using them rather as symbols. This is Niérika, one of the simplest philosophies for understanding reality, it’s yet one of the most complex to translate. The incredible work of John and Colette Lilly, two psychonauts who traveled to 1960s Mexico to study the sacred and healing uses of Mexican ethnobotany.
Address: Plaza de la Ciudadela 2, Centro Histórico
Otto Dix: Violencia y pasión (Otto Dix. Violence and Passion)
Museo Nacional de Arte
Through January 15, 2017
Like no other painter, Otto Dix embodied in his biography and in his art the extremes of his century in Europe. Germany left a decisive mark on him. The two world wars, the culture of the Weimar Republic and the political division after 1945 left him “both one affected and an observer.” The great realist took a critical stand against his time and testified in pictures that still shake viewers.
Address: Tacuba no. 8, Centro Histórico
Arte en nuestro tiempo (Art in our time)
LS Gallery – Polanco
Original works by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Richard Hambleton, Jeff Koons and Brent Waden are being exhibited at LS Gallery as part of their 15th anniversary. A collaboration with Woodbery House Gallery in London, along with collector Andy Valmorbida, made the exhibit possible. Also on view, the permanent collection of the gallery includes no less than works by Rufino Tamayo, Francisco Toledo, and Arnaldo Coen.
Address: Enrique Ibsen 33, Polanco
Lalo Sánchez: Puertas al subconsciente (Doors to the Subconcious)
Bolsa de Valores
In the age of electronic trading, virtually no stock exchange transaction take place in the old Wall Street of Mexico City. Lucky us. Instead, more than 40 works from Mexican artist Lalo Sánchez, most of them with allusions to the doors that the artist obtained while traveling throughout Mexico. Sánchez’s close readings of the textures and patinations have generated fantastic images and reminders that even in the most mundane of everyday objects, a wealth of magic can be obtained.
Address: Paseo de la Reforma 255
¡Mira guapa! Colectiva de jóvenes ilustradoras mexicanas (Hey Beautiful! Young Mexican Female llustrators Collective)
Galería José María Velasco
December 3 through February 12, 2017
In an overwhelmingly male-dominated field, this exhibition is a review of the collective work of female illustrators from all over the republic. The studied eyes of Kenya Nárez and Óscar Rodríguez, curators, in collaboration with Picnic Magazine, linked up young talents in a world of contemporary illustration. With lots that unusual, even within the art market, there’s a lot to look at and ponder.
Address: Peralvillo 55, Peralvillo, col Morelos
Erick Meyenberg: Un futuro anterior (An Earlier Future)
Laboratorio de Arte Alameda
Through March 5, 2017
The fruit of more than two years of artistic-curatorial research between artist, Erick Meyenberg, and curator, José Luis Barrios, the project’s axis is literature. Specifically, aesthetic investigations into the Marcel Proust novel In search of Lost Time, through multi-media, technology, and poetic resources. Through this project, the Alameda Art Lab aims to investigate possible relationships between literature, art, and technology. Meyenberg lives and works between Mexico City and Berlin.
Address: Dr. Mora 7, col. Centro Histórico
El color de los dioses (The Color of the Gods)
Palacio de Bellas Artes
Through January 8, 2017
Ancient Greek texts referred openly to the colors of sculpture. Likewise, historical texts from after the conquest of Mexico also mention the use of color in Mesoamerica. Bernardino de Sahagún referred to the way in which a sculpture of the Sun God was painted. This new exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts highlights the importance of color in ancient art. In the end, it’s an idyllic journey through the visual language of the artists – and their implications for the mythical events of the past.
Address: Ave Juárez (corner Eje Central), Centro Histórico
Victor Fosado: Con mil diablos a caballo (With a Thousand Devils on Horseback)
Museo Carrillo Gill
Through January 8, 2017
Not just a retrospective of the artist’s work, this exhibit also brings us closer to Fozado’s context and the artists who were part of his wide circle of friends and collaborators. A series of documents in conjunction with the work help to expose the new generational order that was beginning to permeate Mexico. Curated by Julian Cuisset, Guillermo Santamarina Angelica Gracia and Victor Fosado, the artist’s son, the show is an invaluable contribution to better understanding his work and time.
Address: Av. Revolución 1608, esquina Altavista, Mexico City
Livia Corona: Nadie Sabe, Nadie Supo (Nobody Knows, Nobody knew)
Parque Galería
Through January 12, 2017
From the age of 21, Livia Corona began photographing Mexico with a documentary lens. The work consisted of walking the roads around various Mexican towns, where he captured often emblematic scenes of Mexican daily life. This new installation, Nadie sabe, nadie supo, includes a series of letter-size photographs and a single-channel video, focusing on the complex history of the conical silos found on farms throughout Mexico.
Address: Puebla No. 170, Roma Norte
Javier Senosiain Arquitectura Orgánica (Organic Architecture)
Museo Nacional de Arquitectura
Through 12 February 2017
Organic architecture or architectural organicism: it’s a philosophy of architecture seeking a harmony between human habitation and the natural world. Seeking always to understand and integrate with a site, buildings, furniture, and their surroundings are unified. Javier Senosiain’s architecture is always a discovery and, at the same time, a surprise. In relation to average architecture from the last 25 years, it is, to say the least, inexplicable and unique.
Address: Palacio de Bellas Artes, Av. Juárez y Eje Central, Centro Histórico
Roger Ballen
FotoMuseo Cuatro Caminos
Through January 22, 2017
Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950. He lived in South Africa for some 30 years. There, he learned to explore territories – some decadent, some ghosts – of people living on the edges of madness, collections of foreign objects, and worlds closed to the habitual gaze. Social. As part of the museum’s first anniversary, this exhibition promises to be extraordinary.
Address: Calzada Ingenieros Militares 77, col. Lomas de Sotelo, Naucalpan de Juárez
Graciela Iturbide: Avándaro
Museo Universitario El Chopo
Through December 10, 2016.
Part of the 45th anniversary of the Rock and Wheels Festival, the Museo Universitario del Chopo presents a series of photographs by Graciela Iturbide. Also on display are videos and documents about the decisive countercultural event of the 20th century. Many of the photos have not been seen in 45 years. The originally published these images as Avándaro (Editorial Diógenes, 1971), the first book of her work, with texts by the filmmaker, Luis Carrión.
Address: Doctor Enrique González Martínez 10, col. Sta. María la Ribera
ILUMINA is an interactive sculpture of light and sound fed by the collective energy of people’s hearts.
Art and technology are two faces of human creativity, two that are also closely related, despite the differences they apparently have with each other. What art does on many occasions has been achieved thanks to a specific technical development, a technology whose existence allows the artists to enhance or limit their creative work. Yes, it conditions it, but possibly also encourages it to transcend those limitations.
In this sense, the relationship between one and another human activities could be found in virtually any era, but it is certainly in recent times when technology has a presence, so persistent, somehow so inescapable, that art has been benefited for incorporating it. Both as a resource, an instrument, as part of the examination of contemporary reality, when many of our practices and interactions almost necessarily pass through a technological device.
Thus, somehow the ideal professed by Nietzsche on the need to transform life in a work of art, but this time through art and technology. Somehow the aesthetic sensibility, the discovery of the admirable or the frankly beautiful that any of us can perceive, finds a vehicle, a means of transmission and expression in how art can be magnified through technology.
Nowadays, it is becoming more and more complex to achieve high levels of consciousness, and to create a community without being outside of technology, but ww can use it as a tool to improve our sensitive abilities. To the same extent that we depend on technology to survive, it has become part of our lives, even in its most spiritual and even transcendental recesses. Art, now more than ever, demands to be a vehicle to explore different states that bring us closer to the dimensions of the infinite
Ilumina is an installation created by the artist Pablo Gonzalez Vargas, who through a deep exploration with the power of interconnectivity, proposes a method to improve the energy field of the planet. Pablo Gonzalez created a majestic interactive sculpture of light and sound that is activated by the emotional states of people, generating a beautiful light show and a sound landscape where the participants enter a state of coherence and deep harmony with themselves and with each other.
Ilumina is a metallic art monument, completed with aluminum and LED lights that together form an architectural piece full of harmony. The piece of art combines technology with a design of ancient wisdom. Ilumina has a program that responds to external stimuli, being able to shine more while more “coherent” is the group that hosts, generating a unique shared experience.
Ilumina is a chilling visual experience, and the volunteers who participate in the exercise of meditative immersion that lasts three minutes, are transported to a state of coherence and deep harmony with themselves, with their fellow participants and with the cosmos through a patented fusion of modern technology and transpersonal art.
The biometric sensors are connected to the ear lobes of each participant, which measures their unique state of coherence and averages them together. This is how lighting design and moving soundscapes respond to a unique algorithm, a product of HeartMath that uses biometric sensors for personal self-training in the regulation of emotional states where the sculpture becomes brighter to the extent that the users experiment with their emotions.
The team that created Ilumina included about 20 people from different disciplines and contributions. There was a large industrial design team that shaped the exact model that was taken to manufacturing. Marco Kalach worked with an expert manufacturing workshop, because as it is a public use facility in particular events, it had to comply with all the rules, structural regulations and with protection codes. The executive producer of the project was Gaby Vargas, who was responsible for the expertise at HeartMath, and joined by mexican musicians and audio engineers to make the experience of 360 degrees of immersive sound, led by Billy Mendez. The lighting team, directed by Paolo Montiel, coordinated all the programming and lighting design that makes symbiosis with the audio.
It was at Burning Man 2012, where Pablo Gonzalez Vargas created an art car called Mayan Warrior: a luminescence project and a spectacular audio show featuring pieces by the artist Alex Gray and musical performances by elite artists from Mexico and around the world.
In the penultimate edition of Burning Man, Pablo Gonzalez and his team decided to go a step beyond the great proposal that is Mayan Warrior, by presenting Ilumina, this piece of sacred geometry that radiates not only light but an algorithmic sacrality, it’s as mystical and hypnotic as an art piece can get. The tower of almost 12 meters high illuminated the Nevada desert at the Burning Man Festival 2017, and users managed to enter a mental state full of concentration characterized by a complete absorption, a wonderful moment of loss of the notion of spacetime.
It is expected that later there will be replicas of these sculptures, so that they can reach new locations around the world, and we can experience this amazing spectacle of light and the soundscape that connects us with the profound mysticism that exists in ourselves and that highlights the interconnectivity of our planet with the global energy fields.
Here are some photos of this beautiful project, in which lies the probability of a coherent and luminous future that would be worth living.
If you want to know more about this beautiful project or about the creative artist and allies that integrate it, visit their social media channels:
Ilumina Art Installation
Sitio web // Facebook // Instagram
Chilangos may cherish their reputation for never reading, but Mexico City libraries present a very contrary picture.
Though the internet makes lots more information available to lots more people, Mexico City libraries have simply not been supplanted. Charged with continually re-inventing themselves, and their places in the public imagination, one can still encounter eras gone by and great historical minds in a library as in few other places.
Knowledge, after all, belongs to everyone. Opening a book, reading it at a study, or just meeting in the silence of one these Mexico City libraries enhances concentration, and provides a welcome respite from everything going on out there in the world.
Of all Mexico City libraries, the oldest were part of the church and one or another of its offshoot organizations. Among these was the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, founded in the 1530s and surviving today as the Biblioteca José María Lafragua. Most of these ecclesiastical libraries were not truly open to the public, and Mexico had to wait for the National Library of Mexico, inaugurated by Benito Juárez in 1867 to enjoy the benefits of a truly public library system.
The list below is intended to let you enjoy some of that system, too.
José Vasconcelos Library
Opened just ten years ago, in 2006, the Vasconcelos is visited by thousands for the sheer spectacle of its innovative design. Graced by the iconic whale from artist, Gabriel Orozco, it’s always a good library for art and visual spectacle. The facade retains something of a colonial appearance, but for sheer scale, and jaw-dropping space, the interior must be experienced.
Address: Eje 1 Norte Mosqueta S / N, Buenavista
Website
UNAM Central Library
We’ve written a lot about it in these pages, but the UNAM library with the Juan O’Gorman murals remains one of the most outstanding of all Mexico City libraries. As a UNESCO site with some 428,000 volumes in the collection, it’s the biggest in Mexico, but lots of folks visit just to see the facade and the surrounding grounds.
Address: Circuito Interior S / N, Coyoacán, Ciudad Universitaria
Website
National Library of Mexico
Opened by Benito Juárez in 1867, there’s still a good one million books inside, today administered by the folks from UNAM. Originally located in the San Agustín church in the city center, the current building was opened in 1979. Geometric, and massive, it’s an extraordinary place to visit.
Address: Av. Universidad 3000, Coyocacan
Website
Miguel Lerdo de Tejada Library
Specializing in economic materials, this collection of some 86,350 books and 114,852 journals is administered by the Secretary of Finance and Public Credit. Founded in 1928, it’s one of the cities true public art spectacles. Inside the main nave of the old Oratory of San Felipe Neri “El Nuevo,” the baroque façade outside is just the beginning. Inside, the murals are futuristic, and not to be missed.
Address: Av. República de el Salvador 49, Centro Histórico, col. Centro Histórico
Library of Congress of the Union
One of Centro’s truly outstanding historical buildings, for centuries it was the convent of the Clarisas from the 16th century. Today it’s something like a “Library of Congress” with a stunning collection of publications and artifacts, but also with a lush, deep, dark intellectual interior, that beckons from centuries past.
Address: Tacuba 29, Centro Histórico
Photographs this page: Flickr – Creative Commons
