MoMA
Posts tagged ‘Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães’
June 30, 2011  |  Collection & Exhibitions
Beatriz González: A Contemporary Court Painter

 

Beatriz González. Acuerdo bancario (Bank Agreement). 1980

Beatriz González. Acuerdo bancario (Bank Agreement). 1980

While preparing the exhibition I Am Still Alive: Politics and Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing, Christian Rattemeyer and I had a conversation with our colleagues Luis Pérez-Oramas and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães about the premise of the exhibition. They immediately suggested that we look at the work of Beatriz González, a leading figure among Latin American Pop artists and currently one the most influential living artists in Colombia, whose work explores sociopolitical subject matter specific to her country’s history and vernacular culture.

 

 

Beatriz González. Turbay condecorado (Turbay honored). 1980

Beatriz González. Turbay condecorado (Turbay honored). 1980

Like many of the works in the exhibition, including Marine Hugonnier’s series Art for Modern Architecture (Homage to Ellsworth Kelly), Robert Morris’s untitled gouache paintings on newsprint, and On Kawara’s storage boxes for his date paintings lined with local newspaper clippings, there is a direct link between González’s work and the newspaper and print culture. When Julio César Turbay Ayala became president of Colombia in 1979, González turned her sketchbook into a visual diary of sorts, producing a simple, stylized drawing each day based on the daily media coverage of his presidency. Her stated intent was to become a type of “court painter,” and to critically document the spectacle of leadership. Made between 1979 and 1981, these drawings—fragmentary depictions of Turbay attending sessions of Congress, meeting with church, government, and military personnel, and engaging in leisure activities—provide an intimate look at the disparate public aspects of power. These works are prime examples of the artist’s straightforward use of drawing in her artistic production, and mark a significant and more politically charged change in her work towards a more explicit reflection on the growing violence and turmoil that engulfed Colombia throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Beatriz González. Turbay esquiando (Turbay Skiing). 1980

Beatriz González. Turbay esquiando (Turbay Skiing). 1980

 


March 18, 2010  |  Artists, Collection & Exhibitions
On View: Wangechi Mutu’s “One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack”

Wangechi Mutu. One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack. 2004

The Modern Myth: Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times, a new exhibition organized by my colleagues Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães and Luis Pérez-Oramas, opened in the Drawings Galleries last week, bringing together a stunning display of works from MoMA’s collection that draw on the motif of mythology. One eye-catching work in the contemporary section of the exhibition is a large-scale collage by Wangechi Mutu titled One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack. She made this work in 2004 during her artist-in-residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and it was acquired by MoMA directly from her soon after our curators saw it on view in the Studio Museum’s exhibition Figuratively.

Though she has also worked in video, sculpture, installation, and, most recently, performance (as part of Performa in 2009), for the past several years Mutu has produced stunning collages of fantastically ornate hybrid women, composed of cut-out images culled from magazines ranging from Vogue to National Geographic, outdated ethnographic surveys, pornography, and botanical illustrations. Mutu is interested in how stereotypes become ingrained into the public conscious, and through her art she investigates gender and racial stereotypes, in particular those pertaining to black women, formulating a distinctly personal position on feminism, postcolonial continental Africa, and globalization.