February 24–June 18, 2016
Opening: February 24, 7–9pm
Americas Society
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue
New York, NY, 10065
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday 12–6pm
www.as-coa.org
Facebook / Twitter / Instagram
Curated by Gabriela Rangel and Tatiana Cuevas
In the early 1990s, Silvia Gruner (Mexico City, 1959) significantly contributed to the creation of a distinct vocabulary for Mexican contemporary art. Her prolific work delves into the relationship between the body and identity, tangling these terms into connected hemispheres where the psychological and private dimensions are mingled with the utterances of the social and political spheres. Over the last twenty-five years, the artist has explored broad themes, including the role of vernacular and popular culture in the narratives of modernity; architecture and its blind spots; the skill of forgetting; the polymorphous function of objects; and love and friendship. More recently, her videos and photographs have undertaken a melancholic meditation on desire and malady through a quiet yet critical contention of the current conditions of possibility.
Gruner has participated on solo and group shows in museums in Mexico, Europe and the United States, including: CIFO, Miami; Museo Carrillo Gil, Museo de Arte Moderno, and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC) in Mexico City; Centro Contemporáneo de Arte Reina Sofía and Casa de América in Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and Participant Inc. in New York, among others. She has also been invited to biennials in Cape Town, Fortaleza, Havana, and Sydney.
The newly produced Hemispheres, a two-channel video installation filmed in the artist’s garden, is the centerpiece of the exhibition that gathers a condensed selection of films and photographs from the 1980s through the present. Gruner’s cinematic, photographic, and performative iterations will be discussed in depth in a fully illustrated publication produced in collaboration with the Museo Amparo in Puebla, which will include original contributions by the curators as well as critics such as Irmgard Emmelheinz, Tarek Elhaik, and María Minera. An expanded version of the exhibition will be presented from October 2016 to January 2017 at the Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico.
Panel discussion: How to Look at Mexican Art
Tuesday, February 23, 6:30pm
The New School, University Center, 63 Fifth Avenue, UL 104
Free admission
This panel is presented by the Visual Studies concentration at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, in collaboration with the exhibition Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner. It will focus on Gruner’s experimental cinema, photography, installation and performance from the 1980s to the present. As a pivotal artist within the Mexican contemporary art scene, her work touches upon critical issues such as vernacular culture in contemporary society, anti-psychoanalysis, and feminism. This event is titled after a key work within Gruner’s oeuvre, How to Look at Mexican Art, which emphasizes the artist’s continual explorations on the dilemma and contradictions that are intrinsic in any given culture.
Participants: Gabriela Rangel, Chief Curator and Visual Arts Director at Americas Society; Tatiana Cuevas, independent curator; and Irmgard Emmelhainz, independent writer, researcher, and professor
Moderator: Soyoung Yoon, Program Director and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School
Exhibition tour
Thursday, February 25, 6:30pm
Artist Silvia Gruner with curators Gabriela Rangel and Tatiana Cuevas will lead a tour of the exhibition.
Silvia Gruner in conversation with María Minera
Friday, February 26, 6:30pm
Silvia Gruner will be in conversation with art critic María Minera whose extensive interview with the artist will be published in the upcoming exhibition catalogue. Gruner and Minera will engage in a conversation about the artist’s oeuvre, influences, and works on display at Americas Society.
Please click here for registration and updates to our spring 2016 programming.
