Thomas Glassford, Cimbra. Photo courtesy Museo de Arte Moderno [MAM], Mexico City, Mexico
Cimbra, Speculative Forms and Metaphysical Weapons
Museum of Modern Art [MAM], Mexico City, Mexico
October 28, 2010 - April 11, 2011
In Mexico, the modern evolution had a vigorous speculative impulse in non-representational discourses, historically labeled as Abstraction. Despite its strong impact on Mexican visuality and its cultural practices in the second half of the 20th century, the critical revisitation of “the abstract” has generally been resigned to decontextualized and formalistic readings of its contributions. However, his playful and speculative spirit, self-referred to his own energy, has also been a constant of radicalism and resistance in the visual production of the country.
In the current contemporary scene in Mexico, works where the analytical construction, the quality of the material, the structural game, the non-referentiality and the metaphysical speculation, converge in a practice that is still difficult to label as abstract.
Thus, these works draw on dissimilar collections: from the pop tradition, to minimalism, to post-conceptual practices and to the very historicity of modern abstractions. Its conceptual motive –in many cases referred to parody modern languages–, emphasizes reductivist strategies, constrains the theoretical-narrative evidence and minimizes any representation model.
Hence, the present exhibition proposes a reflection on these searches, whose intellectual platform and whose visual predicaments, question our accommodation to abstract rhetorics and to the patterns of an artistic perception traditionally linked to the representational. Cimbra…shares with us the challenge of understanding works of art as elusive, opaque, surely unstable mental processes…uncomfortable to pigeonhole.
MAM curatorship
Artists: Ernesto Alva, Guillermo Álvarez Charvel, Gabriel Boils, Georgina Bringas, Francisco Castro Leñero, Aníbal Catalán, Ale de la Puente, Héctor Falcón, Fernando García Correa, Flavio Garciandía, Thomas Glassford, Mariana Gullco, Luis López Loza, Ernesto Morales, Francisco Morales , Paul Nevin, Mario Núñez, Ricardo Pinto, Fernando Rascón, Pablo Rasgado, Ricardo Rendón, Laureana Toledo and Xawery Wolski