Danh Vo

kurimanzutto’s third solo exhibition by artist Danh Vo at its Mexico City gallery includes found objects, oil paintings, lithographs, and bronze sculptures. The works engage the movement of knowledge and goods across time and space, and the sometimes serene, sometimes cruel, interplay of light, craft, and culture.

The exhibition will open with a Rirkrit Tiravanija installation, Untitled, 2001 where the gallery entrance will be bricked closed and spray painted with Guy Debord’s 1958 maxim, “Ne Travaillez Jamais (Never Work).” Debord believed that authentic social life has been replaced by a media society of images made to alienate us from our labor. In an ironic trade in spectacle, Vo will open the exhibition by demolishing the wall.  He is obsessed with the act of making across the ages,  and finds redemption in the forms of labor he puts on display. 

Flowers have been a recurring theme in Vo’s work. They symbolize power through the ways they are named and where they travel. They also possess a resistant quality, serving as an aesthetic refuge from the world. Vo’s flowers are beautiful openings to his thinking about the art object. Flowers evolve, change, and intermingle, sometimes by force, sometimes by accident, and sometimes by desire. Vo’s work considers the travel of things through short timelines (flowers, paper) and long (bronze, marble). He radically amplifies and tears away the context of objects and ideas. His installations are noted for their aesthetic ease and spatial understanding, but also for the way in which they cleverly overlay history, humor and religion. 

The oil paintings in this exhibition, acquired at auction by the artist, feature various humble flowers—roses, daisies, poppies, nightshade—painted by mostly female Northern European artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Vo commissioned his father, Phung Vo, to inscribe the Latin names of the flowers on the backs of the paintings. The works were then sent to Thailand, where artisans used an ancient technique to apply gold gilding to the calligraphy.

“Lick Me, Lick Me” is a series of 47 color lithographs created in collaboration with Edition Copenhagen. The prints feature selected crops from five different Renaissance paintings chosen by Vo, each focusing on specific body parts where the skin is pierced, prodded, pinched, or cut. They have a cinematic effect, montaging a luxurious and violent past of robes, blades, flesh and blood. These renowned Baroque-period works have the dramatic composition favored by the Catholic Church as propaganda against the minimalist purity of the Protestant movement. The works are further modified by the calligraphy of the artist’s (Catholic) father who adds quotes from Regan, the demonically-possessed girl in The Exorcist (Dir. William Friedkin). 

In 2023 Vo made a bronze cast of a 17th-century wooden sculpture of St. Catherine of Alexandria, a 4th-century martyr and the patron saint of philosophers. Having spent several years outdoors at Vo’s rural German farm Güldenhof, the weathered wooden sculpture has now been transformed into a bronze edition of six. The original returns to nature while her likeness is immortalized and embellished with the aura of contemporary art.

Additionally, three new bronze have been cast using ancient stone sculptures from India, Cambodia, and China. Dating from the 5th to the 7th centuries CE, the objects depict figures of goddesses and bodhisattvas from significant archaeological regions. The original works traced the evolution and travel of Hinduism and Buddhism. They all bear traces of their violent looting from rock faces for sale to Western collectors. They embody the promise and the pain of the globalization that they anticipated. They survive as sentinels of their time. 

An original 13 Colonies, US flag is draped around  a 16th-century Flemish oil painting of Madonna and Child. The flag makes an ambient collage with the painting. Through the red, blue and white can be seen a cropped view of the baby Jesus sucking on his mother’s breast. Western Civilization so often paired with Christianity, is here seen as vulnerable and nurturing. Is the child sucking at the teat of Mother Europe? Or, is Europe extracting life from its brave new worlds? 

Italian designer Angelo Mangiarotti was famed for his subtle and efficient modernist furniture whose gentle personal styling hinted at the postmodernism to come. His consoles are made of sand-blasted blue/ gray stone, and are designed with precision cutting and “gravity joints” where the weight of the table top joins the legs that support it. This modern work reaches back to the ingenuity of early artisans. The console here displays and becomes the work. It stands as a specific moment of form, evolving with the rest. 

Danh Vo’s kurimanzutto exhibition masterfully intertwines historical narratives, cultural artifacts, and artistic traditions. By re-contextualizing and transforming objects and materials, Vo invites viewers to consider the complex legacies embedded within them and to reflect on the ways in which art, like culture itself, is reshaped by those who encounter it.