Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present an exhibition highlighting the work of contemporary artists from Mexico. The exhibition includes a variety of media; painting, watercolor, sculpture, and constructions.
A broad historical influence combined with an indigenous style permeates the work of all the artists.
The wooden tablets of Fernando Ramos Prida are painted outdoors and allowed to weather and burn - to become ancient, magical.
Benito Martínez Creel’s Hombre Roto (Broken Man) is a totem figure made of fired clay, its surface etched with iron ore.
The embroidered canvasses of Carlos Arias have roots in the humble craft of needlework, and are also derivative of medieval manuscript illumination.
Francis Alÿs incorporates the styles of his adopted home of Mexico City by appropriating actual sign imagery from the urban landscape. Alÿs then has sign painters work from his paintings to create their own works. He proceeds to make another painting based on their works, and so on. The result is not only a conflation of “high” and “low” forms of art (in true Pop fashion), but a fascinating sense of the image duplicated, interpreted, as infinitum.
The box constructions of Marie José Paz are dense with allusion. References to literature, music, alchemy, games, political life, etc. are contained within worlds created from found objects.
Paul Birbil's densely painted worlds are aflame with urban passion.
More emotionally subdued are the lyrical works of Boris Viskin and Perla Krauze. Viskin's broad, well-worked surfaces combine naive imagery and text in his 1997 triptych Between Paradise and Hell. Krauze employs stone, lead and wood in creating her reflective, textured relief constructions.
Ilse Gradwohl’s surfaces are more detailed; her linear gestures becoming a kind of personal hieroglyphic.
In the painting of Alberto Castro Leñero's hieroglyphs expand to become emblems, or suggestive signs afloat in cosmic fields.
The simple, abstract forms of Fernando García Correa draw the viewer into a plane that is still and quiet, while Mario Nuñez develops a vocabulary of symbols to create a bright and busy world of personal pictographs. Carlos Vargas Lugo cuts and pastes old photographs in much the same fashion.
In bringing together the work of these exciting young artists, Louis Stern Fine Arts hopes to present a sampling of the most accomplished and challenging work that is currently being produced in Mexico.