NM Contemporaneo will be representing Mexico at Pinta Countries with four Emerging Artists: Marela Zacarías, G.T Pellizzi, Minerva Ayón and Bruno Smith, who have been attached to Cuernavaca in some way through their lives and work.
Marela Zacarías (Mexico City, 1978)
Zacarías works with a labor-intensive process that merges sculpture with painting. She fabricates forms out of wire screen attached to wooden supports or found objects to which she applies layers of plaster to create undulating forms. Through sanding, polishing, and painting, she creates sculptures with the quality of fabric, filled with movement and life-force.
Giandomenico Tonatiuh Pellizzi, (Tlayacapan, Mexico, 1978)
Better known as G.T. Pellizzi, his background in architecture set straight lines in building construction in his work, his references from the artist’s explorations of the social constructs compares projections and predictions of the future made within the financial system with the same in ancient Greek myths, astrology and the I Ching, all complex systems constructed to make sense of reality. Monochromatic canvases and lines create the concepts at play behind the sometimes minimal façade of the pieces on display. Themes of gentrification and city transformation come to mind.
Minerva Ayón, (Mexico City,1985)
Graduated from the Bachelor of Visual Arts at the “Centro Morelense de las Artes” in Cuernavaca, Mor. Completed a Master’s in Visual Arts at the San Carlos Academy. Her work is focused on the analysis of the urban identity construction processes as well as their social imaginary meanings wich directly affects the production of specific realities in her pieces. For Minerva Ayón textile is a kind of coming and going process in time along to reflexion, it expresses a time contained as an eternal present in the threads and in the very act of weaving, embroidering or spinning. Working textile is taking action aware of the past and looking to the future. This technique is associated with “feminine” languages and its use as a repetitive ritual, a metaphor for facing pain, loss, and the path for protection and healing. In the work of Minerva these textile cultural associations are related to the underground culture and the tattoo practice as a transgressive element that has been becoming complement to urban culture.
Bruno Smith (New York City,1990) He has a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. Smith works with clothing, blankets and upholsteries either donated, found or from his own past purchases. With the raw material already charged with history and personal attachment, Smith then cuts up and collages the textiles, at once both preserving and destroying their sentimental value. The works are composed like an abstract painting, with large shapes of fabric forming a background and thinner strips traversing on top, mimicking broad brushstrokes. In this post-modern take on painting, Smith inverts the expressionistic gestures of Abstract Expressionism into the calmed and slowed process of sewing. He currently lives and works in New York City.
Leave a Reply