Mexico: Expected/Unexpected

Mexico: Expected/Unexpected presents over 100 artworks selected from the Isabel and Agustín Coppel Collection, which is one of Mexico’s most comprehensive contemporary art collections. From the poetic to the political, Mexico: Expected/Unexpected showcases the key figures of the Mexican contemporary art scene, including Francis Alÿs, Carlos Amorales, Iñaki Bonillas, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Jorge Méndez Blake, Gabriel Orozco, Damián Ortega, Pedro Reyes, and Melanie Smith. The exhibition contextualizes these artists in relation to noted historical international practitioners, such as Lygia Clark, William Eggleston, Gordon Matta Clark, Ana Mendieta, and Helio Oiticica.

In its only United States presentation, Mexico: Expected/Unexpected is shown concurrently in two Southern California venues: the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, further suggesting a viewing structure based on the aesthetics of displacement and on poetic resonances across space and time.

The exhibition is organized in thematic sections that offer a constant interplay of artworks and artists whose exchanges underline the thoughtful development of the Coppel Collection. Instead of a narrative of evolution and progress reflective of a monolithic idea of peoples and places, Mexico: Expected/Unexpected proposes short stories that echo each other along thematic lines.  Painting, photography, installation, video art, sculpture, and text pieces are gathered into sections such as poetics of craftsmanship, the relationship between city and nature, structural affinities,  the iconography of nationalism, imagery of death and mortality, constructive logic, archival accumulation and grouping, and precariousness of everyday life.



more of 2012
Damián Ortega and Gabriel Orozco
at the 11th Havana Biennial, 2012
Abraham Cruzvillegas
in conversation with Mónica de la Torre
Carlos Amorales
Manifesta 9
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