Homage to one of the Mexican contemporary masters
By Margaret Failoni

Art Opening Exprecion de Origen: Homage to Adolfo Riestra Sat, Oct 13, 5–8pm Galeria Florencia Riestra Fabrica la Aurora

October 13 is the third anniversary of the Florencia Riestra Gallery and they are celebrating this occurrence with a small, exquisite exhibition of works by the renowned Mexican artist Adolfo Riestra, coinciding with the eighteenth anniversary of his death. The exhibition will include drawings, early paintings and a small but important selection of sculpture, both in clay and bronze.

I first became aware of this artist during a sensational show held in the early eighties at the Frankfurter in Kunstverein, Germany. The director of the museum and curator of the show, Peter Waiermeir, told me he was blown away by the contemporary Mexican art scene he witnessed during a holiday trip to Mexico and had quickly put together a group exhibition featuring the works of some of the artists he had discovered such as Julio Galan, Rocío Maldonado, Dulce Maria Nuñez, Nahum Zenil and Adolfo Riestra (those are the artists I particularly remember from the show).

In spite of Riestra’s early death, important collectors, private, public and corporate, had already started collecting his work. Some very important pieces can be found in the Televisa, Casa Cuervo and Jumex collections, as well as the Museum of Modern Art. I recently saw a beautiful terracotta torso in the San Miguel home of a major Mexican collector. It is therefore not surprising that a five-star luxury hotel chain as important as the Four Season
s acquired two very large full figure statues for the lobby of their Punte Mita (north Vallarta) hotel, continuing in the Mexican luxury hotel’s tradition of commissioning and/or purchasing major art work for their public rooms.

Contemporary sculptors work with materials very similar to those that have always been used from the time of primitive art. Terracotta is baked clay in one form or another and is perhaps one of the earliest substances which man has attempted for artistic expression. As a child, Riestra was fascinated with the terracotta figures seen in the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City with its wealth of figures large and small of Mayan and Aztec divinities. It is therefore no wonder he chose to use this material in his earlier and most of the later works featuring portraits and busts. Bronze for the more monumental figures came later in life. As sculpture is the art of representing observed or imagined objects or people in solid materials and in three dimensions, it is not surprising that given the fascination with clay, Riestra quickly moved on to sculpture. 

The field of sculpture is vast and represents a rich survey of styles and periods. The sculptural art of the “primitive” periods is much appreciated in modern times and Riestra’s fascination with Mesoamerican art was to be no exception; the magnetic influence of pre-Columbian art was to be a driving force for the artist. An individual of enormous energy, he did not allow the current modernist manner to filter into his work—a difficult task given the artistic mores of the times—but instead, found inspiration with intense studies of the early Mexicans in art, the fulfillment of his aesthetic dreams. No Mexican sculptor of his generation has understood anatomical construction better than Riestra; taste in art and the minimalist manner of interpreting it changes with each generation and it is difficult to judiciously appraise his creations without the perspective of time.

Adolfo Riestra was born in Mexico City into a family of lawyers and notaries and therefore it is not surprising, being the oldest of three children, that he was expected to follow the family tradition. When ready for university, he was sent to study in the renowned School of Law of the University of Guanajuato. During this period, he spent many happy weekends and holidays in nearby San Miguel de Allende. Soon after graduating and still in his early twenties, Riestra was appointed to a judiciary seat on the San Miguel court, the youngest judge in its history, and spent the next two years—from 1965 to 1967—nursing his yearning and innate talent for the arts, driven by the fast-growing art movements of this city. Every spare moment found him sketching, painting and finally, experimenting with sculpture. His formal education and developing legal profession was soon abandoned to dedicate himself passionately and fully to a career in art. He set up a studio and took on a young assistant, Samuel Ramos, a young artist from Celaya. A double portrait in terracotta, created by Ramos from memory soon after Riestra’s death, also will be included in this upcoming exhibition.

And as fate would have it, both of Adolfo Riestra’s younger siblings would take his lead and follow with careers in the art world: his one sister, Florencia Riestra, opened an art gallery and promoted the works of her brother’s contemporaries, and has, over the years become a major dealer in contemporary art and antiques, creating Mexico’s most important, yearly Antiques Fair. Their younger brother, Jaime Riestra, with his wife, Patricia Ortiz Monasterio, founded Mexico City’s most prestigious art gallery for the very avant-garde, the Galeria OMR, and is the executor of the Adolfo Riestra Estate.

With this exhibition at Fábrica la Aurora, Florencia Riestra brings us a rare glimpse into the world of this contemporary master.

Margaret Failoni is an independent curator and art historian who has lived in San Miguel for 13 years. She curates exhibitions of contemporary art for museums, public spaces and some galleries in Mexico after a full-time career in Rome, Italy.

Marta Palau opens at Kunsthaus Santa Fé with the 35th Festival Internacional Cervantino
By Ana Quiroz

Art Opening

Marta Plau

Sat, Oct 13, 7–9pm

Kunsthaus Santa Fé

Santa Fe 22A

152-5608

For the 35th International Cervantino Festival, and marking the 10th anniversary of the contemporary art space Kunsthaus Santa Fé, Marta Palau presents “Double Wall,” “Four Bundles” and “Kachinas,” three installations created between 2006 and 2007. Renowned by curators, critics and artists, the contemporary art gallery founded by Lothar Müller in 1997 celebrates 10 years of diffusion of art with an exhibition by a great artist and a great friend.

Marta Palau has, throughout her career, developed an unusual artistic process that harnesses imperceptible forces like magic and mysticism in ritual acts. Her socio-political stance is notable, actively informed by the contemporary world, by the new wars, by the new injustices and by the new migrations—that is to say, in the tragedies of the present.

At the other extreme of linear time, Marta’s work is linked with the primal, allied with rock painting and its iconography, of the gods and spirits of Mesoamerican cosmology. Her own origin marked by exile since childhood, and her residence in Tijuana, Baja California—a peninsula in which there are magnificent rock paintings—have immersed her in concepts, beliefs and images from both the past and present.

Forerunner of the installation art-form in Mexico, her materials come above all from the earth, items one might encounter walking along any road—trunks, branches, seeds, flowers, mud, etc. With “repetition as a conjuring strategy,” with a tiny bead and another tiny bundle, she constructs the form and soul of her work. Knots, brushstrokes, feathers or stones, among many other objects, create complex surfaces; like an expressive but indecipherable code, as surprising as the vagaries of life itself.

The installation “Double Wall,” exhibited in 2006 in the Siqueiros Hall of Public Art in Mexico City, is an altar and homage to the men and women who cross the great line, the border of the continent. The installation was created at the time George W. Bush ordered the construction of the border wall between Mexico and the United States, a desperate act of imperialism in the face of a diaspora that is impossible to hold back. Every day, men and women are annihilated in a country that does not care about them but uses them. On this side of the continent, uncertainty and anguish defines the life of a family that loses a loved one already gone.

“Double Wall” is formed by two rows, each with seven steps, made out of branches, dirt, string, etc. Each one is different; they are suspended on flimsy, transparent threads, without any utility in spite of their great height; they are the unfulfilled wishes of a path marked by a plethora of elements. Between the two sets of stairs lies the flayed skin of a man on a straw mat who represents the death of an immigrant. In the shadow of the uselessness of the double wall, the sinister and squalid forest looks like a cemetery, like a trench that belies once again the history of crossing and dying in the attempt.

“Four bundles of thirteen” is an installation formed by four bunches of fibers from the maguey plant, each of which contains thirteen skulls. This piece is related to Mesoamerican numerology, counted in cycles of 52 years; thirteen times four, the four directions of the universe and the thirteen months (or the thirteen full moons) of each year. This cycle is nonetheless a claim against death. The skulls all askew—not carefully arranged as is the custom with the tzompantlis—hang carelessly like any kind of merchandise. Fifty-two heads are few in comparison with all the murders of women in the city of Juarez, of women used like merchandise, of the impotence and impunity of a system that is not interested in life, nor death of common people.

“Kachinas” are dolls and fetishes that indigenous people of North America make and use. This installation is formed by a combination of gods or warriors, part of the FFF (Feminine Forces of Fertility) which constantly appear in the work of Marta Palau. In these deities the power and wisdom of being feminine is manifest as a fundamental part of the equilibrium of life on this planet.

In a world of high technology and rationalism, Marta prefers subtle substances, the spirit of things, natural materials, manual constructions and the beliefs of our ancestors.

Marta Palau was born in Lérida, Calaluña in 1934, and immigrated from Spain to Mexico in 1940. She now lives and works in Tijuana and Mexico City. In addition to being a plastic artist, she is a great promoter of contemporary art. She has organized three salons “Five Continents and One City” in Mexico City, five international salons of textiles in the state of Michoacán and is the founder and director of three salons and subsequent International Biennial Expositions of Banners in Tijuana, Baja California. She has received an Honorary Doctorate for Catalan exiles from the University of Lérida, Spain. She received a Fellowship of the National System of Creators. She obtained the Burgerpreis in the Feldbach Triennial exposition in Germany in 1992 and first prize in the category of installations in the Biennial Exposition of Havana in 1986. 

Marta Palau participates in hundreds of international expositions; among the most important was the Biennial Exposition of Sao Paulo in 1987. She has various publications, the most recent an extraordinary book published by Turner Press, with essays by Rita Eder, Cuauhtémoc Medina, José Luis Barrios, Francisco Reyes Palma, Renato González, Ida Rodríguez Prampolini and Gerardo Mosquera.