“Al Amigo Que No Me Salvó La Vida: Pinturas Mexicanas 1978-1992” curated by Su Wu. With works by Adolfo Riestra, Francisco Toledo, Georgina Quintana, Germán Venegas, Julio Galán, Nahum B. Zenil, and Roberto Turnbull.
MASA presents a revisitation of 1980s Mexican painting, centering work – some not previously on view this century – from artists who hovered between sincerity and provocation in meditations on devotion, melancholy, and bodily function. Rather than a regional variant of postmodernism, here the effort of confession is presented as a spiritual and aesthetic challenge in the face of political, tectonic, and existential crises. The exhibition investigates in defiant materiality a tenderness towards the visceral, and the anatomization of observation and sensation that lends itself to both eroticization and revelation. As the era’s leading Mexican critic Teresa del Conde (1938-2017) wrote, these are works that “allow us to apprehend with a certain irony the aesthetic sides of very serious things: beliefs, vices, childhood, sexuality, and what awaits towards the end.”
With special thanks to Proyectos Monclova, Le Laboratoire, Galeria OMR, Galeria de Arte Mexicano, Francisco Berzunza, Archivo Adolfo Riestra, and Collecíon M. Jasso, Madrid.
For inquires info@mmaassaa.com
