Artists: Omar Barquet, José Bedia, Jorge Méndez Blake, Carlos Cárdenas, Los Carpinteros, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Eugenio Dittborn, Gonzalo Fuenmayor, Carlos Garaicoa, Guillermo Kuitca, Gilda Mantilla, Moris, Vik Muniz, Oscar Muñoz, Damián Ortega, Liliana Porter, Sandra Ramos, Pablo Rasgado, Camilo Restrepo, Graciela Sacco, Ana Tiscornia, José  A. Vincench, Ishmael Randall Weeks, and many others.

A Sense of Place – Selections from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection
Curated by Patricia Hanna and Anelys Alvarez
December 3-6, 2015
Mana Contemporary
Miami, FL, USA

Despite the fact that these artists are working in a globalized society, where technology and communication transcend physical boundaries, many continue to construct personal and cultural identities by exploring ideas that are specific to their own experiences and places of origin. The show will examine the idea of building such an identity; how artists use abstraction, architecture, politics and memory to carve out a sense of place; and how these concerns are reflected in Pérez as a collector and in Miami as a developing city. Artists in the show include a mix of well-known and emerging art stars from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, including: Omar Barquet, José Bedia, Jorge Méndez Blake, Carlos Cárdenas, Los Carpinteros, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Eugenio Dittborn, Gonzalo Fuenmayor, Carlos Garaicoa, Guillermo Kuitca, Gilda Mantilla, Moris, Vik Muniz, Oscar Muñoz, Damián Ortega, Liliana Porter, Sandra Ramos, Pablo Rasgado, Camilo Restrepo, Graciela Sacco, Ana Tiscornia, José  A. Vincench, Ishmael Randall Weeks, and many others.

Jorge M. Pérez was named one of the most influential Hispanics in the U.S. by TIME magazine, and is considered a visionary for his contributions to South Florida’s cultural and artistic landscape, as well as his integration of world-class art into each of his real estate developments.

A Sense of Place is being held at Mana Wynwood Convention Center, 318 NW 23rd Street, Miami, Florida.

• Happenings

Artists: Pablo Accinelli, Edgardo Aragón, Juan Araujo, Felipe Arturo, Nicolás Bacal, Milena Bonilla, Paloma Bosquê, Pia Camil, Bevenuto Chavajay, Marcelo Cidade, Donna Conlon & Jonathan Harker, Nicolás Consuegra, Minerva Cuevas, Elena Damiani, Mariana Castillo Deball, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Federico Herrero, Voluspa Jarpa, Runo Lagomarsino, Adriana Lara, Engel Leonardo, Valentina Liernur, Mateo López, Renata Lucas, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Nicolás Paris, Amalia Pica, Pablo Rasgado, Pedro Reyes, Adrián Villar Rojas, Gabriel Sierra, Clarissa Tossin, Carla Zaccagnini.

United States of Latin America
Curated by Jens Hoffmann and Pablo León de la Barra
September 18, 2015 – January 3, 2016
Museum of Contemporary Art
Detroit, MI, USA

The exhibition United States of Latin America brings together more than thirty emerging artists from Latin America, many of whom will be exhibiting in the United States for the first time.

The show is based on an ongoing conversation between two curators, Jens Hoffmann and Pablo León de la Barra, who for a number of years have exchanged research and information about artists, artworks, and the overall development of the art world from Mexico to Argentina and the many countries in between. The exhibition is an extension of this dialogue into the galleries of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit via artworks suggested in dialogue format.

United States of Latin America features a wide range of works in a variety of mediums, for instance a series of photographs about housing in Havana, a film about the effects of gang violence in Mexico, sculptures reflecting on the involvement of the CIA in Latin American dictatorships, drawings of historical monuments from the future, a floor map about the selling of Brazilian rubber to the United States, boulders from a Colombian river that have been turned into flip-flops, and paintings about the interplay of modernist houses, tropical vegetation, and utopian architecture. The individual artworks touch upon themes such as geography, history, urbanism, memory, colonialism, architecture, war, modernism, social inequality, regionalism, and power. Given how Latin America’s realities oscillate between the colonial and the contemporary, between severe economic hardships and enormous financial expansions, between flourishing democracies and suppressive dictatorships, and between great progress and immense regression, the exhibition presents an intentionally fragmented survey, a deliberately disjointed overview, of the region and the art being made there. It allows the viewer a glimpse into a reality that may seem geographically near, but is in many ways far away and unfamiliar.

The curators invited a number of writers and curators from throughout Latin America to contribute to a glossary of terms that articulate the region’s historical landscape and conceptual syntax. This glossary will be published in the exhibition catalogue along with a conversation between the curators, texts on all of the artists, images of the exhibited artworks, and a roundtable discussion featuring a number of curators based in Latin America.

Developed in collaboration with Kadist Art Foundation, United States of Latin America is curated by Jens Hoffmann, MOCAD senior curator at large, and Pablo León de la Barra, guest curator. A range of public programs and educational activities will run concurrently with the exhibition, including a public conversation with the curators, lectures by some of the participating artists, film screenings, and performances.

• Happenings

Monochrome Undone
SPACE Collection

Curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
October 24, 2015 – April 1, 2016
SPACE, Irvine, CA

Artists: Ricardo Alcaide, Alejandra Barreda, Andrés Bedoya*, Emilio Chapela, Eduardo Costa, Danilo Dueñas, Magdalena Fernández, Valentina Liernur, Marco Maggi, Manuel Mérida, Gabriel de la Mora, Miguel Angel Ríos, Lester Rodríguez, Eduardo Santiere, Emilia Azcárate, Marta Chilindrón, Bruno Dubner, Rubén Ortíz-Torres, Fidel Sclavo, Renata Tassinari, Georgina Bringas, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Thomas Glassford, José Luis Landet, Jorge de León, Bernardo Ortiz, Martin Pelenur, Teresa Pereda, Pablo Rasgado, Ricardo Rendón, Santiago Reyes Villaveces, Mariela Scafati, Gabriel Sierra, Jaime Tarazona, Adán Vallecillo, Horacio Zabala.

The monochrome as a focus in the SPACE Collection began in a spontaneous form and soon became a systematic field of research. This exhibition is about the contemporary monochrome in Latin America. The monochrome is one of the most elusive and complex art forms of modern and contemporary art. If we think about its origins or meaning, we find that the monochrome is many contradictory things. The monochrome is neither a movement nor a category; it is not an “ism” or a thing. It may be painting as object, the material surface of the work itself, the denial of perspective or narrative, or anything representational. The monochrome may be a readymade, a found object, or an environment—anything in which a single color dominates. The monochrome can be critical and unstable, especially when it dialogues critically or in tension with modernism. This exhibition is organized into four different themes: The Everyday Monochrome, The White Monochrome, The Elusive Monochrome and The Transparent Monochrome. These themes have been conceived to create context and suggest interpretations that otherwise might be illegible.  These may overlap at times, pointing to the multiplicity of content in many of the works. The unclassifiable and variable nature of the monochrome in Latin America today is borne of self-criticality and from unique Latin contexts, to exist within its own specificity and conceptual urgency.

To purchase the catalogue click here.

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El monocromo, como enfoque de SPACE Collection, comenzó de forma espontánea y a poco se convirtió en un campo de investigación sistemático. Esta exposición trata sobre el monocromo contemporáneo en América latina. El monocromo es una de las formas de arte más elusivas y complejas del arte moderno y contemporáneo. Si reflexionamos acerca de sus orígenes o su significado, nos encontramos con que puede albergar muchas cosas contradictorias. El monocromo no es un movimiento ni una categoría; no es un “ismo” ni una cosa. Puede ser la pintura como objeto, la superficie material de la obra, la negación de la perspectiva o de todo lo representativo o narrativo. El monocromo puede ser un readymade, un objeto encontrado, un cuadro o un ambiente: cualquier cosa definida como una superficie cromáticamente uniforme donde un solo color predomina. El monocromo puede ser crítico e inestable, especialmente cuando se dialoga críticamente o en tensión con el modernismo. Esta exposición está organizada en cuatro temas: el monocromo cotidiano, el monocromo blanco, el monocromo elusivo y el monocromo transparente. Estos temas han sido concebidos a fin de crear un contexto y sugerir interpretaciones que de otra manera podrían ser ilegibles. Éstos pueden superponerse a veces, apuntando a la multiplicidad de contenidos en muchas de las obras. La naturaleza indeterminada, inclasificable y variable del monocromo en Latinoamérica hoy en día es producto de la autocrítica y de los contextos propios, para existir dentro de su propia especificidad y urgencia conceptual.

• Projects

Artists: Omar Barquet, Pablo Rasgado, Omar Rodríguez-Graham, Javier Areán, Veronica Bapé, Miguel Angel Cordera, Taka Fernandez, Agustín González, Jacqueline Lozano, Javier Pérez, Eric Pérez, Patricl Petterson.

Pararrayos
Curated by Christian Barragán
May 27 – July 2, 2015
Embajada de México en Alemania
Berlin, Germany

Group show with contemporary Mexican painters.

• Happenings

Artist: Pablo Rasgado

Ellipsis
May 9 – June 6, 2015
Steve Turner Contemporary
Los Angeles, CA, USA

The show features five bodies of work from the last seven years. Rasgado’s works deal with such natural phenomena as gravity, light and energy along with their attendant results—time and ephemerality. He uses a variety of familiar materials—drywall, glass, tape, florescent bulbs, dirt, spiderwebs—to focus on that which is just beyond ordinary perception. In a sense, each work is a clock, recording decay and change over time. Deceptively simple, the works constitute a compendium of phenomena just beyond the grasp of material experience.

Pablo Rasgado (b. Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico, 1984) has had solo exhibitions at Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2011, 2012 & 2014); Arratia Beer, Berlin (2012 & 2014); OMR, Mexico City (2013); and Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City (2011). He has also had work in group exhibitions at CAM Raleigh (2014); The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2013); Ex Magazzini di San Cassian, Art Collateral Events, 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Herzlya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel (2013); Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2012); and Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City (2010). His work is owned by public collections including Wattis Foundation, San Francisco; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Jumex Collection, Mexico City; and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He lives and works in Mexico City.

• Happenings

Artist: Pablo Rasgado

Afterlife
November 14, 2014 – January 25, 2015
Arratia Beer
Berlin, Germany

For his new series, Pablo Rasgado has delved into the depths of catalogues raisonnés, into the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou and other archives in an attempt to recover lost images. One may argue that every research is an endeavour to retrieve or discover something that is lost or at least unknown. In Rasgado’s case however the objects he pursued had to remain lost in order to be singled out and reclaimed. Rasgado was searching for the blind spots of art history: The images that his serendipitous investigation has disclosed were those that have gone missing, that have been misplaced, destroyed, forgotten, or stolen at some point in their biography, whose provenance expired into the status “present whereabouts unknown.”

Rasgado set himself the task of repainting these works in their actual size and as close to the original as possible. However the new images mimic not their originals but rather their surrogates, the photographs, in regard to the amount of detail and most importantly their colour palette: most of the re-painted works adopt the greyscale of the photographs taken at some point over the last century and transform the reproduction into an oil grisaille.

Accordingly the paintings chosen by Rasgado necessitate two predicaments: that they are nowhere to be found, and that at some point before their loss they were photographically recorded. Rasgado collides the media and genres of painting and photography and with them their many complex evocations of the absent, of their status as emanation or representation of something that they are not. He also collides two distinct chronologies: The paintings date back to the 1440s up to the 1960s, but their photographic records follow a different and independent timeline, as well as a very distinct phenomenological status.

Image: courtesy of the artist and Arratia Beer

• Happenings

Artists: Nathan Green, Laura Vandenburgh, Pablo Rasgado.

Constructs
January 17–March 1, 2015
Curated by Rachel Adams
Disjecta Contemporary Art Center
Portland, OR, USA

Constructs introduces a collection of works that address the interactions between scale, architecture and the body. Each artist will create new site-specific pieces, ranging from the calculated and Op-Art inspired abstraction of Nathan Green, to the cascading cut-out paintings of Laura Vandenburgh, to the calculated wall excavations of Pablo Rasgado.

Nathan Green (b. 1980) lives and works in Dallas. He received his BFA in 2004 from the University of Texas at Austin.

Pablo Rasgado (b. 1984) lives and works in Mexico City. He holds a BFA from the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, Mexico.

Laura Vandenburgh (b. 1962) lives and works in Eugene. She holds an MFA from Hunter College, New York, and a DVM and BS in Zoology from the University of California, Davis.

• Happenings

Artists: Allora and Calzadilla, Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen, Laura Belém, Jorge Méndez Blake, Leyla Cárdenas, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Jose Dávila, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Moris, Oscar Muñoz, Daniela Ortiz, Pablo Rasgado, Santiago Sierra, Melanie Smith, and Agustina Woodgate.

Limited Visibility
Curated by Patricia Garcia-Velez Hanna and Natalia Zuluaga
October 3, 2014 – January 4, 2015
CAM (Contemporary Art Museum) Raleigh
Raleigh, NC, USA

Voluntary omission, erasure, withholding, and concealment: these are the methods the artists in Limited Visibility employ in order to draw attention to that which is missing. The representations of absence such as the missing object of labor in Allora & Calzadilla’s sandpaper composition or the cutouts in Jose Dávila’s photographs play a key role in this exhibition as they determine, border and define the void they surround. What we see in these images, paintings, and installations is what is not there: each work absents presence and presents something absent. Seer, seen, and unseen come together here to evoke the haunted sensation of searching and looking. Though the aims of each of the works in this exhibition are different—from a demand for political representation to the materialization of an otherwise ephemeral moment—the artists in Limited Visibility draw our attention to the omitted, giving it a kind of determination or persistence that is hard to ignore. In each case, the viewer is required a certain amount of belief to fill in that which is not visibly available—these are not riddles, but questions with actual answers in the form of artworks.
Patricia Garcia-Velez Hanna and Natalia Zuluaga

Image: Top – Left to Right: Jorge Méndez Blake – Hotel Monturiol, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer – Make Out, Jose Dávila – Topologies of Belief, Allora & Calzadilla – Shape Shifter. Bottom – Left to Right: Laura Belém – Temple of One Thousand Bells, Santiago Sierra – 89 Huicholes, Moris – Miradas I

• Happenings

Artists: Jonathan Binet, Nathan Peter, Pablo Rasgado, Karin Sander

Translation Movement
April 26, 2014
Travesía Cuatro
Madrid, Spain

• Happenings

Artists: Ernesto Alva, Verónica Bapé, Balam Bartolomé, Omar Barquet, Saúl Gómez, José Luis Landet, Moris, Calixto Ramírez, Pablo Rasgado, Omar Rodríguez-Graham, Tania Ximena, Cynthia Yee

Curated by Christian Barragán

Superficie en Tensión
January 25 – March 22, 2014
Diagrama
Mexico City, Mexico

Entre el arte contemporáneo, la pintura en la actualidad continúa una disputa dentro y fuera de sus límites sobrentendidos. De ser una superficie pulida, determinante y estática, pasó a ser una superficie en tensión, abierta, inacabada, donde cada artista -desde su particular condición y posición- cuestiona la naturaleza y el campo de acción de ésta disciplina, generando un diálogo con la historia remota y presente. Fue a partir de 1913 que Marcel Duchamp abandonó la pintura-pintura, aquella con aroma a terebantina, por la pintura-idea; fue el comienzo de su verdadera obra, que incluye los readymades y el Gran Vidrio (1915-1923). Es también ése año el comienzo de una nueva época en el arte: la sustitución de la obra-representación por la obra-presencia, asunto del cual Roland Barthes se ha ocupado en su ensayo el Grado cero de la escritura y Octavio Paz en Apariencia desnuda, de ahí la siguiente cita: “El artista no es un hacedor; sus obras no son hechuras sino actos.” Desde ese momento la pintura para Duchamp es un objeto de investigación interna, lo es en dos sentidos, de sí mismo en tanto creador y como análisis del arte en tanto lenguaje. Respecto a esta decisión de Duchamp, Paz escribió, “su fascinación ante el lenguaje es de orden intelectual: es el instrumento más perfecto para producir significados y, asimismo, para destruirlos.” La pintura, a un mismo tiempo,  arma y cuerpo de su propia batalla.

El siglo veinte es el siglo de las vanguardias: entre otras, Impresionismo, Fauvismo, Expresionismo, Cubismo, Futurismo, Abstracción, Suprematismo, Dadaísmo, Metafísica, Constructivismo, Surrealismo, Arte Conceptual, Minimalismo, Land Art, Pop Art… Un siglo de más de cien años en los cuales el arte fue un campo abierto, dinamitado desde el feudo de la pintura. A semejanza del acto de Duchamp, ahí está Warhol haciendo pintura en serigrafía, apropiándose de la multiplicidad y serialidad de imágenes que ofrecían los medios masivos de comunicación en el momento; o Basquiat recurriendo a cuanto soporte tuvo frente a sí, ya sea la puerta de un refrigerador o muebles de madera en desecho, atando palos y tela, mugre y óleo para pintar; o Richter y su realismo austero de la posguerra, además de sus densos barridos de color; o Oehlen explorando las posibilidades de la escala a través del ordenador sobre polímeros; o Baldessari y su “Cremation Project” (1970), en el cual hizo quemar todas las pinturas que había realizado hasta entonces. Un siglo, aún pues, de “tradición y ruptura” (Paz dixit).

La obra reunida en Superficie en tensión son “actos” interesados en la pintura, investigaciones llevadas a cabo por un grupo disímil de artistas congregados por sus procesos de trabajo sobre la vigencia y alcances de lo pictórico. Por ello, cada obra es una aproximación, un modo de concebir, de enfrentarse, ante el gesto pictórico dentro y fuera del bastidor. Los encuentros con la pintura suceden más allá de la superficie, y así descubren o amplían otros ámbitos y contextos, posturas e incomodidades, dudas y cuestionamientos. No importa ya la condición suprema de la pintura sobre otras disciplinas, sino del arte en su condición de creador-destructor de conocimiento, sentido, crítica y significado para asumirse frente a un tiempo y espacio específicos: el aquí y el ahora del arte contemporáneo. Superficie en tensión es un ejercicio que atiende no sólo la pervivencia de la pintura, sino también la vitalidad del arte.

• Happenings

Selected Biographical Information

Education / Training

• 2010: Proyecciones y Superficies Workshop, National Center for the Arts, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2010: Ejercicio de Correspondencia Workshop, SOMA, Mexico.
• 2007: Diploma Course in Museology, Centro Cultural Casa Lamm, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2006: BFA, Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, Mexico.
• 2003: Diploma Course in Photography, Centro Morelense de las Artes, Mexico.

Prizes / Fellowships

• 2013: Artist-in-residence, SE RENTA.
• 2012: Bancomer MACG Program Fellow.
• 2011: Artist-in-residence, La Chambre Blanche, Québec, Canada.
• 2011: International Residency Program at the École Superier d’Art et Design, Saint Ettienne, France.
• 2010: Young Creators Grant, Painting, National Fund for Culture and Arts, Mexico.
• 2007: Mexican American Fellowship, Mexican American Foundation.

Solo Exhibitions

• 2013: “Vanishing Act”, Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
• 2012: “Monochromatic Muralism”, Arratia Beer, Berlin, Germany.
• 2012: “Victoria Pirrica”, ATEA, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2011: “Arquitectura Desdoblada”, Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2011: “Wall to Wall”, Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
• 2008: “Eternity in an Empty Room”, Arcaute Arte Contemporáneo, Monterrey, Mexico.

Group Exhibitions

• 2013: “Other People’s Problems: Conflicts and Paradoxes”, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Tel Avi.
• 2013: “When Attitudes Became Form Becomes Attitudes”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, USA.
• 2013: “Lost Line: Contemporary Art from the Collection”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA.
• 2012: “Tiempo de Sospecha”, Museum of Modern Art, Mexico.
• 2012: Bienal Tamayo, MACO, Oaxaca, Mexico.
• 2011: Transitio_MX04- Festival of Electronic Arts and Video, Mexico City, Mexico.

Publications

• 2012: “Arquitectura Desdoblada/Unfolded Architecture, ” Beau Dessordre Press, First Edition, Mexico.
• 2012: “Nieve”, Malpais ediciones, First Edition, Mexico.
• 2010: “Desde las entrañas de Teotihuacan”, México Desconocido Magazine #404, XXXIV, October.
• 2009: “Preserración de Forma y Equilibrio”, Oráculo, Revista de Poesia #29-30, año 9, October.
• 2009: “Six years on paper”, Bard Free Press, Volume 10, issue 5, 2009.

• Artists