Bringing together over sixty works produced over the past decade, Through the Flesh to Elsewhere is Mexican-born, New York-based artist Felipe Baeza’s first institutional solo show.
Felipe Baeza’s (b. 1987 Guanajuato, Mexico) practice is as much a confrontation with charged pasts—the ways we remember them and how they shape us—as it is a love letter to those whose sense of personhood is constantly litigated and defined by those in power. Born in Mexico, raised in Chicago, and now living and working in New York, Baeza trained as a printmaker—exploring the material and formal possibilities of the medium but perhaps more importantly its complicity in the construction of Western thought and its resulting modes of representation. Mobilizing print production technologies that were instrumental in creating Othering mechanisms for the colonial project, Baeza began to make a series of etchings, prints, silkscreens, and photogravures that challenged the ways these forms have been...violently used to act upon subjects. This process led to Baeza’s conceptualization of what he calls fugitive bodies—racialized, queered, and otherly-abled persons whose existence transgresses multiple limitations of identity. These figures, that emerge in his works—rendered in different states of visibility and often cloaked with ancestral symbols and images—are not resolved but rather always in a process of becoming. What they share in common is an unabashed beauty sited beyond aesthetics.
For Baeza, beauty is emancipatory—liberating these bodies from the circumstances they’re prescribed to and allowing us to see them fully as they are and what they can be.
This exhibition traces these fugitive bodies as imagined by Baeza over the last ten years through more than sixty works that will be presented together for the very first time.
Felipe Baeza: Through the Flesh to Elsewhere is organized by The Mistake Room and curated by César García-Alvarez, TMR Executive & Artistic Director.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Felipe Baeza (b. 1987 Guanajuato, Mexico) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union in 2009 and a M.F.A. from Yale University in 2018. Baeza is the 2017 recipient of The Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Traveling Fellowship and The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation Traveling Fellowship. Solo exhibitions include La Emergencia de Hacer Memoria, Fortnight Institute, New York City (2019), and Felipe Baeza Maureen Paley, London (2018). Other recent exhibitions include Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Contemporary Art in the 50th Year of the Stonewall Era, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA (2019), as well as XL Catlin Art Prize, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California, USA, and No Longer Yours, The Mistake Room/Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico (2018).
ABOUT THE CYCLE
Histories of a Vanishing Present (2019-2020) explores how a generation of artists born at the cusp of the global turn inherit pasts that don’t directly belong to them. Through the lens of postmemory, this cycle tackles a new relationship with identity politics forged by a millennial generation of artists for whom ideas of nationalism, cultural heritage, and historical trauma are radically different than for their predecessors. Why do military dictatorships in Latin America, the legacies of the Cold War, the activist histories of the LGBTQ and Civil Rights movements, or independence movements in Africa shape conversations about the work of a global generation of emerging artists whose sole relationship to these moments is the place of their birth, the color of their skin, their sexual orientations, or the familial histories they contend with? At a time when ideas of identity are being revisited in charged and polarizing ways, how can we rethink subjecthood not as a predefined category but as a tense and ongoing process of becoming? This cycle considers identity as situational—as a negotiation between the stories of those who came before and the responsibilities of those who are expected to inherit them.
Major support for The Mistake Room's programs is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Generous support for this exhibition is provided by The Mistake Room's Board of Directors, Big Mistake Patron Group, International Council, and Contemporary Council.
This exhibition is made possible with the support of Maureen Paley, London.
Entrada actualizada el el 15 may de 2020
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