Gabriela Jauregui

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  picks February 07, 2023

  Tania Pérez Córdova

  “Generalización” (Generalization), a decade-spanning survey of Tania Pérez Córdova’s work and her first solo museum show in Mexico, beautifully interweaves the artist’s long held interests in time, materiality, and nature while quietly staging a conversation with the museum itself. In the small outdoor garden that houses Tamayo’s memorial plaque, delicate gold chains dangle almost invisibly above—and pierce through—the leafy palms of a concrete planter, the chains’ swaying movement gradually scarring the fronds (“Rain,” 2022–). Indoors, longer chains, some with seeds and pits, others with coins,

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  picks October 12, 2022

  Martín Soto Climent

  For the solo show “Hay una palabra para nombrar la hora de la noche en silencio” (There is a word to name the silent hour of night), Martín Soto Climent continues his alchemical transformation of three-dimensional objects into topological drawings, moving from his earlier surreal and humorous pieces into a more abstract, contemplative mode. For the first time, the artist presents paintings and drawings made with charcoal sourced from his own garden, which he layers and polishes over and over until the black is caressed to shine. Depending on the angle from which they are observed, the graphite

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  print May/June 2020

  Yollotl Gómez Alvarado

  Since time immemorial, humans have wondered how sleeping and dreaming impact and influence our waking lives. If dreams are the stuff of biblical prophecy, Shakespearean verse, or Freudian psychoanalysis, city dwellers today mostly complain about having trouble sleeping. A whole gamut of sleep disorders entails a huge market of clinics and over-the-counter and prescription potions. Yollotl Gómez Alvarado’s exhibition “Temple of Dream: Proposal for a Sleeping Society” condensed all of these aspects of sleep and dreaming and more, including a hint at contemporary “wokeness,” but it also involved

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  passages September 25, 2019

  Francisco Toledo (1940–2019)

  WE FELT IT IMMEDIATELY: the profound sense of orphanhood following the news of Francisco Toledo’s death. One of Mexico’s greatest artists, Toledo took up his mother’s last name and his parents’ Zapotec culture from the Oaxacan isthmus of Juchitán, on the country’s southernmost edge. After spending his youth in 1960s Paris, where he befriended Rufino Tamayo and Stanley William Hayter, Toledo went on to make a body of work that infused indigenous Zapotec traditions with Western mythology, eroticism, and avant-garde aesthetics. His practice drew from a hybrid of fluid references, not only in the

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  picks February 05, 2018

  “Mothers of Men”

  What better way to celebrate than with friends: For its tenth anniversary, the gallery is hosting an exhibition of works by Moyra Davey, R. H. Quaytman, and Vivian Suter. The show addresses kinship and gender and is based on a yearlong correspondence between the three artists, all of them mothers of millennial sons, as they note in the press release. In addition to their own offspring, they also wrote to each other, starting in 2016 after a gathering in Athens, about what pills they take, the weather, dogs, and dust. The result of their exchange is an exhibition not just of three individuals

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  print May 2017

  Yoshua Okón

  As the title indicates, Yoshua Okón’s exhibition “Miasma” deals with a sticky and disagreeable subject matter: CIA interventions in Mexico. But the political subject matter is handled from an oblique perspective, inviting viewers to fill in the blanks or question what they are seeing. In fact, without reading the exhibition text, one might never have noticed the connection between the work on view and the CIA’s activities in Mexico. It was clear, though, that the United States was a preoccupation of the artist’s: The first thing one saw on entering the gallery was an unframed photograph of a

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  print April 2017

  Miguel Calderón

  Miguel Calderón’s first solo show in Mexico in eight years was met with both rumor and expectation. Some people thought he had dropped out of the art world and was focusing on music, films, or something else. His feature film, Zeus (2016), debuted at the Morelia Film Festival last year and touches on subject matter similar to that evoked by this exhibition, “Caída libre” (Free Fall), hosted by kurimanzutto off-site at a grimy warehouse space that Calderón once used as a studio. Not only did exhibition confirm Calderón’s presence in the Mexican art scene, it revealed how his work has matured

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  print December 2016

  Fritzia Irízar

  Given that Fritzia Irízar’s recent exhibition “Golden Green - Greening Gold” focused on the mining of that most useless yet perennially attractive and signifying metal, its other principal element was something of a surprise: water. In Mexico, mining has been the source of tremendous ecological devastation, and the depletion of this substance is one of many recurring problems. In addition, nearly a third of the nation’s territory has been consigned to foreign companies for extraction, leading to the dismemberment of communities, the appropriation of territory without local consent, and the

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  print May 2016

  José León Cerrillo

  I arrived at the gallery to find the lights still off, the door locked. No matter. A look through the windows revealed an exhibition made to be seen from the outside looking in. From the street, I could see a blue tennis-court floor cutting through the space, landing like a slanted pancake on top of the rooms. In some ways, this piece—Double Fault (all works 2016)—presented a visual paradox. Because it traversed more than one room, it couldn’t fully be comprehended from outside; the only way to understand it was to move through the space. Yet the exterior perspective was in other ways

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  print March 2016

  Nairy Baghramian

  Nairy Baghramian’s first Mexican exhibition, “Hand Me Down,” reveals her ability not just to occupy but to play with space, rendering an institutional space intimate, bizarre, filling it with shards of bone or bits of organs that bring to mind bodies in a posthuman world. In this show, her work comprises three kinds of structures: five large, leather-covered resin sculptures in pale, dusty colors, hanging from the walls like lungs, chunks of brain, or soft prostheses, each titled Chin Up (all works 2015); bony, delicate, polished steel-and-silicone structures set on the floor like remnants of

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  previews January 2016

  “When In Doubt . . . Ask: A Retrocollective Exhibit of Mónica Mayer”

  As the retrocollective of the title suggests, the first retrospective of Mónica Mayer’s work will emphasize the collaborative nature of the Mexican artist, critic, and activist’s forty-year feminist art practice. Highlighting her engagements with such coconspirators as Victor Lerma and Maris Bustamante, the show will also underscore the importance of Mayer’s dialogue with north-of-the-border associates Suzanne Lacy and the members of Los Angeles’s Feminist Studio Workshop and Woman’s Building. Mayer made a habit of preserving so-called ephemeraas a political act,

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  picks October 19, 2015

  Juan José Gurrola

  Although Juan José Gurrola has suffered from relative anonymity outside specialized circles in Mexico, his work spans many genres—from theater and opera to painting and performance, not to mention a few precious films and collaborations with figures such as Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Hockney. For Gurrola’s current show at House of Gaga, Fernando Mesta, the space’s director, unearthed (literally) and restored two of the artist’s large-scale paintings, which are here presented with a fake flying bee that circles overhead.

  The installation works beautifully and includes video documentation of