Silvia Gruner “Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook”

Americas Society

poster for Silvia Gruner “Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook”

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Americas Society 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.

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.

Media

Schedule

from February 24, 2016 to June 18, 2016

Artist(s)

Silvia Gruner

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