Thinking Forms - how we mold our thoughts or
Spoken Forms - how we shape our thoughts into words or
SOCIAL SCULPTURE - how we mold and shape the world in which we live
Sculpture as an
evolutionary process;
Everyone an Artist

- Joseph Beuys, 1979

Over the last ten years, Mexico City has emerged as a thriving hub for a new generation of artists who have re-shaped the context of contemporary Mexican art. After Mexico's ratification of NAFTA and during the political instability that ensued, these artists often made work reflecting their surroundings, and through artist-run spaces and collaborative efforts, they drew international attention. These artists re-examined historical art trends, such as conceptualism, "actions" and "happenings," and embraced non-traditional sculptural mediums such as photography, video, and performance. Their work also reflects aspects of popular culture-television, music, advertising, or flea markets - and its history, urban life, and current political issues, but does so in a fresh new way that is not readily identifiable as Mexican.

Unlike recent larger surveys of Latin American Art or overviews of art from Mexico, Escultura Social is not attempting to define a cohesive or national identity but rather brings together artists of the same generation (born in the late 1960's and 1970's with careers emerging from roughly 1995 to 2005) and location (Mexico City) whose works share an approach to art-making. A free spirited lack of preciousness about the art object pervades their work, which may speak to today's inflated art market and systems of value, but also reflects the spirit of conceptual and critical practices of previous decades.

Pedro Reyes, Klein Bottle Capula, 2007, Stainless-steel frame and woven vinyl chord, 15 x 7 1/2 x 8 feet

While not comprising a cohesive movement, these artists are not arbitrarily being shown together; they know each other, some even went to elementary school together, and many have worked together, forging an updated version of the collective. Mexico City serves as a central geographical locus because it is where most of these artists went to university, developed their early careers in the 1990s, and had points of contact. Over a decade has passed since this initial experimentation began, and these artists now live and work across Mexico, the United States and Europe.

German performance artist Joseph Beuys's idea of social sculpture, translated into the Spanish escultura social, is used as a unifying point of reference: the works are all socially engaged, they draw connections between people, animals, and nature; they revisit conceptual practices/actions from the 1960s, and promote a demystified and democratic idea of artmaking. In addition, the circulation and meaning of images, objects, and actions are at the crux of these artists' works and the exhibition provides an opportunity to showcase their recent developments. It includes site-specific, performative and ephemeral projects in addition to videos, photographs, and installations by several artists, including Maria Alós, Carlos Amorales, Julieta Aranda, Gustavo Artigas, Stefan Bruggemann, Miguel Calderon, Fernando Carabajal, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mario Garcia-Torres, Daniel Guzman, Pablo Helguera, Gabriel Kuri, Dr. Lakra, Los Super Elegantes, Nuevos Ricos, Yoshua Okon, Damian Ortega, Fernando Ortega, Pedro Reyes, and dynamic young architect Fernando Romero.