marta minujín
Marta Minujín (Buenos Aires, 1943) presents her first solo exhibition in Mexico in more than twenty-five years. Life in Art brings together a selection of historical and recent works that bear witness to the great impact she has had on the global art scene. For over seventy years, Minujín has transformed the notions of what contemporary art could be, and participated in movements that sought to break with conventionalism, allowing her to become one of the most important figures of Argentinian art and a global icon.
The title of the exhibition reflects on the artist’s profound desire to imprint every aspect of life with art. Pioneering in happenings, performance, and interactive art, Minujín has demonstrated throughout her extensive career that art can infiltrate every aspect of human existence: from our most intimate spaces to global politics and markets.
One of the main pieces in the show is El obelisco acostado (The Obelisk Lying Down), presented in Mexico for the first time. This piece from 1978 gave way to the series La caída de los mitos universales (The Fall of Universal Myths), and was originally exhibited in the Bienal Latinoamericana de São Paulo that same year. Lying across the gallery space, a replica of the obelisk at the Plaza de la República in Buenos Aires invites the public to walk through it and discover a series of videos by the artist projected inside. One of the video works shows documentary footage of the original obelisk in Argentina, while another presents the supposed relocation of the monument from Buenos Aires to São Paulo. These videos activate the sculpture as a narrative and conceptual mechanism—one that questions the origin and meaning of cultural myths.
The simple gesture of laying down a monument and making it accessible undermines its symbolic authority. Verticality—and with it, the phallocentrism embedded in many monuments—has long been a target of Minujín’s work, which seeks to disarm these structures through the active participation of the public. Initiated more than four decades ago, The Fall of Universal Myths series offers a powerful dismantling of the symbols that uphold official state narratives. Its continued relevance today speaks to the urgent need to rethink, through horizontality, new forms of representation and collective experience in our societies.
Surrounding the fallen obelisk is a selection of mattress works that Minujín has been creating since 2006. The mattress first appeared in her work during the 1960s, while she was studying in Paris. At the beginning, she repurposed discarded mattresses found on the streets near hospitals, painting them with striped patterns inspired by the fashionable miniskirts of the era—infusing them with a vibrant, provocative energy that echoed the spirit of the sexual revolution. When asked about her interest in this material, she replied: “Half of your life takes place on a mattress. You are born, you die, you make love, you can get killed on the mattress.” In the more recent series of mattress works presented here, Minujín constructs intertwined soft forms that she paints in strident colors, transmitting a sense of movement, vitality, and joy. These sculptures are accompanied by a group of drawings that echo their exuberant forms and palettes, offering a closer look at the artist’s pictorial practice and the relationship between her two- and three-dimensional work.
Life in Art allows us to appreciate different aspects of the Argentinian artist's work and invites us to reflect upon Minujín’s role in the consolidation of Latin American art as a vehicle for the global avant-garde.