February 6, 2016–March 17, 2016
kurimanzutto
Gob. Rafael Rebollar 94
Col. San Miguel Chapultepec
11850 Mexico
Hours: Tuesday–Thursday 11am–6pm,
Friday–Saturday 11am–4pm
T +52 55 5256 2408
Abraham Cruzvillegas, Damián Ortega, Dr. Lakra, Gabriel Kuri and Gabriel Orozco
Curator Guillermo Santamarina
Taking the Taller de los viernes (Friday Workshop) (1987–92) as a point of departure, Guillermo Santamarina brings together Abraham Cruzvillegas, Damián Ortega, Dr. Lakra, Gabriel Kuri and Gabriel Orozco in order to conduct a new exercise in creative thinking. Making use of a game—sometimes resembling a charade of gregarious sparring—these artists share examples of their recent creative processes. The present-day dynamic of this exhibition stems from an antecedent of shared reflection and experimentation: the Taller de los viernes, a spontaneous and undoubtedly playful scenario that allowed its members to explore the nature of creativity outside the established academic structures of the time.
Over the course of five years, Gabriel Orozco opened up his house in Tlalpan as a space for exploration, criticism and production. The taller planted the seeds of an intellectual exchange whose effects can still be felt in the work of the artists in this exhibition. Differing in purpose and structure from an established collective, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Dr. Lakra, Gabriel Kuri and Damián Ortega describe the experience as merely a series of moments they spent together. The Taller de los viernes had no manifesto, no claim on a specific place in the cultural panorama, and no aspirations towards organizing exhibitions or creating finished works. Rather, it was a conduit for transmitting and receiving information, for forming and deforming the “artistic endeavor.”
Revisiting this moment reveals Santamarina’s beginnings as a curator, when he began inviting several of these artists to participate in events that, a little later on, would be seen as moments that interrupted old models of investigation with fresh aesthetic pronouncements.
Every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway crossing it from one side to the other
Chris Sharp invites Rodrigo Hernández to kurimanzutto
February 6–March 17, 2016
Working with the most classical media and techniques of art making, including drawing, sculpture and painting, Rodrigo Hernández’s practice interrogates the nature of art, the divisions that characterize it, and their relationship to contemporary epistemology. For all the apparent naïveté of his work, it takes nothing for granted, asking what a drawing is or a figure or even the moon. He draws on a number of aesthetic references, which range from Meso-American culture to European modernism, among others, to develop a formal vocabulary that is all his own.
For this exhibition, Hernández presents a new body of work that, oscillating between representation and abstraction, the pictorial and the sculptural, combines elements from two specific sources: the illustrations that the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias made for his book El arte indígena de México y Centroamérica and a variety of elements from the visual vocabulary of the Italian avant-garde movement, Futurism. Interested in the meditative interiority of the one (e.g., the spiral of pre-Colombian art) and the quixotic explosiveness of the other, Hernández has filtered these two points of reference through his own idiosyncratic way of seeing things, transmuting them into objects that thrive on formal, spiritual and ideological ambiguity.
—Chris Sharp
For additional information, please contact: Julia Villaseñor, press [at] kurimanzutto.com / T +52 55 5256 2408