Colección Jumex: Everything Gets Lighter
Guest Curator: Lisa Phillips, Director of the New Museum, New York.
Everything Gets Lighter presents works by 67 artists whose work speaks to light and lightness as a response and antidote to the complexities of contemporary art.
The title of the exhibition is inspired by the 2002 poem Everyone Gets Lighter by the American artist John Giorno. The poem is a reflection on clarity and luminosity, and how being lighter can help in confronting life’s challenges.
This becomes a guiding thread throughout the exhibition to address physical and spiritual, political, social, and ecological issues, and how art can become a sustaining force for humanity in these unsettling times.
GALLERY 2
The first works encountered in the gallery give form to light and lightness that also memorialize people and events.
“monument to V Tatlin” is a sculpture made of industrial fluorescent lights. Dan Flavin began using these fixtures to produce his work in the 1960s with this series that combines the standard lengths in different geometric compositions. The works play a significant role in art history by making a sculpture of light itself and, as with is minimalist peers, removing any trace of the artist’s hand from its production.
Teresa Margolles’s work is composed of a shard of wood gathered from a ruin in the Sechuan province, China, following an earthquake. Its support, a piece of pure gold, is inscribed with the date of the earthquake and the numbers of those who suffered or with lost in the event. This modest sculpture, the size of a piece of jewelry is distinct from much of Margolles’s work in form and scale yet is indicative of her ongoing preoccupation in memorializing the forgotten people of history.
Two works, one by John Giorno and the other by Ugo Rondinone are directly related to the exhibition’s themes of light and poetry. They partly share the same title Everyone Gets Lighter which inspired the title of the exhibition and are fragments of a poem by Giorno.
Giorno’s was recognized as a leading figure in spoken word poetry, also converting his poems into objects, installations, and performances to the shown in the gallery. The two artists were life companions and shared interests in poetry and language in their practice. Giorno’s painting features the title of his poem on a rainbow background in the style of a fly poster that also signifies a politics of the LGBTQ+ movement in which he was active. Rondinone’s sculpture of a tree is titled with a line from the same poem. Cast in translucent resin, the piece interacts with light in a ghostly fashion that suggests loss.
Kenneth Noland was part of the Color Field movement in the US, painters who explored abstract compositions and the interaction of colors to create a sense of depth. Cool Yellow shows circular bands of thickly applied paint in distinct tones and hues that have an optical effect and create a sense of depth.
The untitled canvas by Laura Owens appears as a detail of a clapboard house common in the United States. Her use of mark-making creates this scene through simple gestures. At the center is black square which seems out of place as it suggests a monochrome painting installed in the grass or, alternatively, hiding a detail of the painting. Owens’ practice uses such conscious reference to the history and technique of painting to create depth and illusion through different means.
For an exhibition in 2001 in Italy, Rudolf Stingel covered the entire surface of a gallery with Celotex, an insulation material of foam covered in metallic foil. Throughout the exhibition visitors were encouraged to make their mark in the surface, writing their names or making drawings with their hands. At the end these panels were converted into paintings. The use of insulation material and its reflective surface impedes vision in contrast to the interaction of the public in making the piece.
Robert Ryman was a painter who explored the canvas as an object and paint for its material properties. He developed his own notion of “real light” in his work, using white paint in the main so they may respond and reflect their environment. Pack is painted incompletely, with the raw canvas showing in parts, and a layer of colored primer just visible at the edges of the gestural marks in the white paint surface.
Abstrakt Bild, in English “Abstract Image”, es an oil painting by Gerhard Richter. Richter’s paintings are varied from realist images to abstraction, yet each inspired by qualities of photography. In this work, the quality of light and dragged paint may suggest a Polaroid during its development. Photography plays a role in Richter’s work not only as visual reference, but for its ability to register moments in history, both personal and cultural. What is captured in images also implies what is obscured in his work.
Vik Muniz uses impermanent materials such as ketchup, chocolate and even water to replicate iconic images from history. Tony Smith, Die, 1967 is the recreation of a photograph that documents an important sculpture. One of the first minimalist pieces, Die, was a simple metal cube by Tony Smith. In this work Muniz’s has used dust to copy the original image, which is then rephotographed in contrast to the solidity and permanence of the piece it represents.
The sculptures in the center of the gallery relate lightness and physical form.
Hanging from the ceiling is Capula 8 by Pedro Reyes. It is composed of two intersecting spheres formed from plastic cords over a metal frame constructed in a similar manner to the ‘Acapulco chair’. The shape itself also refers the continuous surfaces of a mobius strip or Klein bottle where inside and outside are part of the same surface. It is possible to enter the structure as a place of rest and reflection.
The Twelfth Hour of the Poem by Ugo Rondinone is a large black lightbulb sculpted from wax. The poetry of the work is apparent in the associations of a light source that cannot illuminate nor create shadows, and the transformation of wax, formerly used for candles as artificial illumination, into its electric replacement. It is part of a series, each dedicated to an hour of the day, for a project title The Night of Lead.
Site Cube #4 forms part of a series of sculptures by Haegue Yang, each a cube of perforated metal with wheels. Inside light bulbs and candles create their own illumination in an altar-like space. While the sculpture suggests a spiritual space and is mobile, its electrical supply anchors it to the roof and the physical world.
A sphere lit from the top, four sides, and all their combinations is a study of an object and its illumination by Sol LeWitt. The 28 photographs illustrate all the possibilities the simple rule of the title can produce. LeWitt’s work used rules and permutations, helping to define conceptual and minimalist art that focused on procedures, process, and geometric forms instead of artistic expression.
Tom Friedman uses simple materials to create sculptures that appear chaotic, fragile, and imbalanced. Untitled (Consumer Boxes and Famous Faces), includes common packaging and images cut from popular magazines. Many of the shapes seem to be in motion, drawn from shapes used in cartoons to signal movement.
In the rear gallery are works of fragile and modest materials that are subject to physical forces and speak to how subtle gestures and ambiguity of form in art can reflect our relationship with the world around us.
Alan Saret’s Heptarch’s World explores the relationship between order and chaos, which the artist associates with the natural and the man-made. The artist has created a series of works that he calls “Flexible Sculptures”: figures without a defined form that stand in contrast to the sculptures of other artists, which used large blocks of steel and heavy materials. Saret uses chicken wire, steel and copper strands, and coated wire to make tangled forms that can hang from the ceiling or wall or rest on the floor.
Leonor Antunes’s works employ materials that change through gravity. The two works at the center see strings, cords and other elements suspended from frames that hang from the ceiling. The works sit between architecture and sculpture with an informal presence. On the wall are two works from the series Anni, whose name refers to Anni Albers, a highly influential textile designer and professor who used industrial production to create her geometric patterns. Antunes’s works emulate Albers’s designs in brass, whose grid-like structure have no defined final state.
Jim Hodges´s Somewhere Between Here and There is a reflective surface that appears to have been affected by a traumatic force. The mosaic of broken mirror fragments has been reassembled on a canvas. Reflective, shining and illuminated works are common in Hodge’s work to suggest the fragility of life.
Elliott Hundley is known for his intricate collages of found objects and images pinned to a surface, the pins penetrating to the other side. The piece is neither a sculpture, drawing and painting and can be viewed from other sides, the back showing a colorful drawing in crayon. Hundley’s manner of working creates a cosmos, as evidenced in the combination of surgical scans in one part, figures and real objects in others.
The photograph Parachute in Iceland (West) by Gabriel Orozco is part of a series of images he captured of open parachutes subject to the wind from each of the points of the compass. Set in the dramatic, volcanic landscape of Iceland this is a confusing image that addresses if the parachute is an observation, or a scene created by the artist.
Pé de Conhecimento, in English “Foot of Knowledge” by Ernesto Neto is made from nylon that is hung and stretched from various points and includes hanging elements filled with sand and clove powder. The informal structure is neither bodily nor architectural. The period in which the work was produced was marked by Neto incorporating spices into his work to involve other senses in the experience of his work following pieces which were designed to be handled.
The works along the final wall of the gallery suggest transcendence from the weight of the world through images of flight and imagination.
The Small cloud series by Olafur Eliasson also takes place in the Icelandic landscape has he observes the passing of time through the changes in the sky across nine otherwise identical images.
Hypnotize is a painting by Gary Simmons of white shooting stars on grey paint. It is part of a series that use these symbols that, as with all his work, hold critical meaning towards race and class politics in the USA. His practice also includes chalk drawings which are applied, rubbed out and redrawn, in acts of erasure that have similar meanings.
Alighiero e Boetti made a series of textiles and paintings with artisans and designers in Italy and Afghanistan during the 1980s, who followed his instructions so that the artist’s hand was not involved in the production. Aerei was made with the architectural firm of Guido Fuga to create a sky crowded with aircraft, from fighter and passenger planes to cargo planes. This work is part of a series of pieces with a similar design and skies of different colors.
Doug Aitken has been constantly inspired by the relationship between the periphery of his natal California and globalization in a relation with advanced technology in contrast to social exclusion. This photo, entitled Passenger, captures the passage of what appears to be a private jet from the window of a commercial airliner.
The work of Fernanda Gomes uses careful placement of her media to create her work, placed with equal care to react to their surroundings. Two pieces, each made of two white canvases share the same measurements, one placed horizontally, the other vertically. A third work is made of a single wire hung on the wall that is almost imperceptible.
The White Light Painting by Mary Corse, is typical of her approach in which she uses a reflective paint, more commonly used in road signs. From certain angles the surface of the canvas shines creating a composition of light that is not anchored to the object. Corse is part of a group of artists from California named the Light and Space movement who sought to use optics and perception to transcend the physical properties of their art.
