Americas Society Presents Solo Exhibiton of Goundbreaking Mexican Artist Silvia Gruner

Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner will feature a newly produced video installation as well as film and photographic works by the pioneering artist

On view at Americas Society from February 24 through June 18, 2016
Curated by Gabriela Rangel and Tatiana Cuevas

Press Preview: Tuesday, February 23, 2016, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

Press Inquiries:
Adriana La Rotta | alarotta@as-coa.org | 1-212-277-8384
Kariela Almonte | kalmonte@as-coa.org | 1-212-277-8333

New York, January 22, 2016 —Americas Society is pleased to present Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner, a solo show that revisits the work of the Mexican artist. Trained in the United States and Israel, Gruner is considered one of the most relevant and original figures of the 1990s in Mexico. Curated by Americas Society Chief Curator and Visual Arts Director Gabriela Rangel and Mexican independent curator Tatiana Cuevas, Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner will be shown at the Americas Society Art Gallery from February 24 through June 18, 2016. A press preview will be held on Tuesday, February 23, 2016 from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm. R.S.V.P.: mediarelations@as-coa.org. An expanded version of the exhibition will be presented from Fall 2016 through early 2017 at the Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico.

Over 30 years, Silvia Gruner has created a personal and distinct photographic, sculptural, and performative practice influenced by post structuralism, feminism, and experimental film. Her multidisciplinary approach informed the artistic exchanges and critical debates that took place in Mexico City in the 1990s. Moreover, Gruner’s work was central to the brilliant generation of artists and curators who created independent spaces in Mexico City at that period, which fermented the development of experimental artistic practices that transformed the Mexican megalopolis into a global venue for contemporary art. Considered a risk-taking proponent of film, performance, and photography, Gruner’s work has delved into the relationship between the body and identity, both personal and collective—a dichotomy reflected in the two hemispheres that dictate the pace of her artistic work: a psychological and subjective dimension, and a political and cultural one.

"Silvia Gruner is a prolific artist with a consistent corpus of works in which she has dissected both the cultural and political memory and the emotional power of objects with her shrewd capacity of observation. Her installations, photographs, and films, which were very influential in the 1990s in Mexico, blended irony and a tragic sense of loss. Today, her work distills a quiet subversion that confronts us to compromised conditions of possibility," says Americas Society Chief Curator and Visual Arts Director Gabriela Rangel.

Silvia Gruner has participated on solo and group shows in museums in Mexico: Museo Carrillo Gil, Museo de Arte Moderno, and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC); Europe: Centro Contemporáneo de Arte Reina Sofía and Casa de América in Madrid; and the United States: Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and Participant Inc. in New York, among others. She has also been invited to the Cape Town, Fortaleza, Havana, and Sydney biennials.

The newly produced Hemispheres, a two-channel video installation filmed in the artist’s garden, is the centerpiece of the exhibition that gathers a condensed selection of films and photographs from the 1980s through the present. Gruner’s cinematic, photographic, and performative iterations will be discussed in depth in a fully illustrated publication produced in collaboration with the Museo Amparo in Puebla, which will include original contributions by the curators as well as critics such as Irmgard Emmelheinz, Tarek Elhaik, and María Minera.

"Silvia Gruner significantly contributed to the creation of a distinct vocabulary for Mexican contemporary art through a sophisticated appropriation of vernacular culture via conceptual, feminist, and experimental references. Her work proposes a complex anthropological analysis of the individual and the collective through memory, psychoanalysis, and eroticism. This insistent grounding on the body and its desires has been a key strategy of resistance to the vertiginous new models of production within the contemporary emphasis on virtual flows," says co-curator Tatiana Cuevas, Mexican independent curator.

Highlights of the exhibition include:

• The films Sand (1986) and Sentinel (2007) in which Gruner shows the two possibilities of facing abyss and turbulence.
• The photographic diptych How to Look at Mexican Art (1995).
• Bauhaus for Monkeys (2011), a series of photographs of the monkey’s cages at the Berlin Zoo that illuminates the unlikely encounter of modernist functionalism and clinical environments.
• 500 kilos of Impotence (or possibility) (1998), a work in which Gruner leads the viewer into tasks based on pattern and repetition, weight, and lightness, which are duties that are never accomplished.

The exhibition Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner is organized in collaboration with Museo Amparo.

The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of PHILLIPS, Lead Sponsor of Americas Society’s Visual Arts Program. The exhibition is also supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Additional support is provided by Genomma Lab Internacional, Mex-Am Cultural Foundation, and Harpo Foundation. In-kind support is graciously provided by the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York, the Consulate General of Mexico in New York, AMEXCID, the Mexico Tourism Board, and Hotel Americano.

Image Credit: Silvia Gruner, Hemispheres, front garden, HD video, 2014.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS
ON VIEW
February 24 – June 18, 2016
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue at 68th Street
New York, NY 10065
View map
Gallery hours:
Wednesday to Saturday
12:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Free admission

PRESS PREVIEW
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Curators Gabriela Rangel and Tatiana Cuevas will host the media and will be available for interviews.
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue at 68th Street
New York, NY 10065

PANEL DISCUSSION: HOW TO LOOK AT MEXICAN ART
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
6:30 pm
Organized by Americas Society and The New School in conjunction with the exhibition Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner, this panel discussion will focus on Gruner’s experimental cinema, photography, installation and performance from the 1980s to the present. As a pivotal artist within the Mexican contemporary art, her work touches upon critical issues such as vernacular culture in contemporary society, anti-psychoanalysis, and feminism. This event is titled after a key work within Gruner’s oeuvre, How to Look at Mexican Art, which emphasizes the artist’s continual explorations on the dilemma and contradictions that are intrinsic in any given culture.
Participants: Gabriela Rangel, chief curator and Visual Arts director at Americas Society; Tatiana Cuevas, independent curator; and Irmgard Emmelhainz, independent writer, researcher, and professor. Moderator: Soyoung Yoon, program director and assistant professor of Visual Studies, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School.
The New School
University Center
63 Fifth Avenue, UL 104
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Free admission

This panel is presented by the Visual Studies concentration at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, in collaboration with the exhibition Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner.

EXHIBITION PREVIEW FOR MEMBERS
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
5:00 pm
Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner
Curated by Gabriela Rangel and Tatiana Cuevas.
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue at 68th Street
New York, NY 10065

EXHIBITION GENERAL OPENING
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
7:00 pm
Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner
Curated by Gabriela Rangel and Tatiana Cuevas.
Free admission

EXHIBITION TOUR
Thursday, February 25, 2016
6:30 pm
Curators Gabriela Rangel and Tatiana Cuevas will lead a tour of the exhibition.
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue at 68th Street
New York, NY 10065
Admission: Free for Americas Society members; $10 for non-members. Free for Hunter College students (please bring your student ID).

SILVIA GRUNER IN CONVERSATION WITH MARÍA MINERA
Friday, February 26, 2016
6:30 pm
Exhibition artist Silvia Gruner will be in conversation with Mexican art writer María Minera whose extensive interview with the artist will be published in the upcoming catalogue of the exhibition Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner. In this event, Gruner and Minera will engage in a conversation about the artist’s oeuvre, influences, and works on display at Americas Society.
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue at 68th Street
New York, NY 10065
Admission: Free for Americas Society members; $10 for non-members. Free for Hunter College students (please bring your student ID).

Please check as-coa.org/visualarts for updates to our Spring 2016 programming.

Americas Society is the premier organization dedicated to education, debate and dialogue in the Americas. Established by David Rockefeller in 1965, our mission is to foster an understanding of the contemporary political, social and economic issues confronting Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada, and to increase public awareness and appreciation of the diverse cultural heritage of the Americas and the importance of the inter-American relationship. Americas Society Visual Arts program boasts the longest-standing private space in the United States dedicated to exhibiting and promoting art from Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada; it has achieved a unique and renowned leadership position in the field, producing both historical and contemporary exhibitions.