Americas Society is pleased to present Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner, a solo show that revisits the work of the Mexican artist. Trained in the United States and Israel, Gruner is considered one of the most relevant and original figures of the 1990s in Mexico. Curated by Americas Society Chief Curator and Visual Arts Director Gabriela Rangel and Mexican independent curator Tatiana Cuevas, Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner will be shown at the Americas Society Art Gallery from February 24 through June 18, 2016. A press preview will be held on Tuesday, February 23, 2016 from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm. R.S.V.P.: mediarelations@as-coa.org. An expanded version of the exhibition will be presented from Fall 2016 through early 2017 at the Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico.
Over 30 years, Silvia Gruner has created a personal and distinct photographic, sculptural, and performative practice influenced by post structuralism, feminism, and...experimental film. Her multidisciplinary approach informed the artistic exchanges and critical debates that took place in Mexico City in the 1990s. Moreover, Gruner’s work was central to the brilliant generation of artists and curators who created independent spaces in Mexico City at that period, which fermented the development of experimental artistic practices that transformed the Mexican megalopolis into a global venue for contemporary art. Considered a risk-taking proponent of film, performance, and photography, Gruner’s work has delved into the relationship between the body and identity, both personal and collective—a dichotomy reflected in the two hemispheres that dictate the pace of her artistic work: a psychological and subjective dimension, and a political and cultural one.
"Silvia Gruner is a prolific artist with a consistent corpus of works in which she has dissected both the cultural and political memory and the emotional power of objects with her shrewd capacity of observation. Her installations, photographs, and films, which were very influential in the 1990s in Mexico, blended irony and a tragic sense of loss. Today, her work distills a quiet subversion that confronts us to compromised conditions of possibility," says Americas Society Chief Curator and Visual Arts Director Gabriela Rangel.
Silvia Gruner has participated on solo and group shows in museums in Mexico: Museo Carrillo Gil, Museo de Arte Moderno, and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC); Europe: Centro Contemporáneo de Arte Reina Sofía and Casa de América in Madrid; and the United States: Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and Participant Inc. in New York, among others. She has also been invited to the Cape Town, Fortaleza, Havana, and Sydney biennials.
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.
"Silvia Gruner significantly contributed to the creation of a distinct vocabulary for Mexican contemporary art through a sophisticated appropriation of vernacular culture via conceptual, feminist, and experimental references. Her work proposes a complex anthropological analysis of the individual and the collective through memory, psychoanalysis, and eroticism. This insistent grounding on the body and its desires has been a key strategy of resistance to the vertiginous new models of production within the contemporary emphasis on virtual flows," says co-curator Tatiana Cuevas, Mexican independent curator.
Highlights of the exhibition include:
The films Sand (1986) and Sentinel (2007) in which Gruner shows the two possibilities of facing abyss and turbulence.
The photographic diptych How to Look at Mexican Art (1995).
Bauhaus for Monkeys (2011), a series of photographs of the monkey’s cages at the Berlin Zoo that illuminates the unlikely encounter of modernist functionalism and clinical environments.
500 kilos of Impotence (or possibility) (1998), a work in which Gruner leads the viewer into tasks based on pattern and repetition, weight, and lightness, which are duties that are never accomplished.
The exhibition Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner is organized in collaboration with Museo Amparo.
The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of PHILLIPS, Lead Sponsor of Americas Society’s Visual Arts Program. The exhibition is also supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Additional support is provided by Genomma Lab Internacional, Mex-Am Cultural Foundation, and Harpo Foundation. In-kind support is graciously provided by the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York, the Consulate General of Mexico in New York, AMEXCID, the Mexico Tourism Board, and Hotel Americano.
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Entrada actualizada el el 03 may de 2016
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