The exhibitions not to miss, from Bogotá to Rio de Janeiro


Latin America: 8 must-see shows 

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After spending months shut down due to the pandemic, many of the galleries listed below have just reopened their doors. In conversation, gallerists all emphasized how significant it was to be in their spaces again. They kept coming back to the points of contact: the meeting between different artists’ pieces in group shows, the encounter between visitors and artworks – those connections that can only truly happen in the flesh. The global crisis is far from over, but these green shoots bring hope worth celebrating.

Dan Perjovschi and Joe Broderick Instituto de Visión, Bogotá Through December 19, 2020‘The exhibitions we present are about the connections you can make, the dimensions you open by placing two or more artists together,’ says&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1161/Instituto-de-visi%C3%B3n" target="_blank">Instituto de Visión</a>'s&nbsp;co-owner and artistic director Beatriz Lopez. Titled ‘Volver al Futuro’ (Back to the Future), the Bogotá gallery’s latest show conflates the work of the Colombia-based artist Joe Broderick and Romanian artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/17169/Dan-Perjovschi" target="_blank">Dan Perjovschi</a>. Lopez says that she sees similarities between Romania and Colombia, places ‘where the context is so strong that artists use similar strategies to communicate about the political situations.’ Here, the two artists are showing drawings, murals, and cartoons that are directly political, using immediacy and humor to reflect on what may be, Lopez says, ‘painful realities.’ And the title? Like the works on view, the nod to the Hollywood movie in which Michael J. Fox is sent back in time by a crazy professor in a converted 1980s DeLorean car is a humorous way of addressing what looking at the artists’ work makes abundantly clear – ‘How little has changed in the past 50 years,’ says Lopez. In the exhibition, like in history, comedy and tragedy intertwine.<div></div>

Siembra kurimanzutto, Mexico City Ongoing (no closing date)‘“Siembra” [or Sowing] is a way to rethink how the gallery works,’ says&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1182/kurimanzutto" target="_blank">kurimanzutto</a>’s co-owner José Kuri. ‘We were asking, how can we elongate this experience of exhibition-making and have meaningful conversations with artists over time? So we planned a show that would last a year, and now maybe longer.’ The gallery’s space was divided into seven separate rooms that each have their own schedule and show a different program. The idea is to work not only with kurimanzutto’s established roster but also with younger artists, or artists represented by others, as well as with local artist-run spaces, such as Biquini Wax EPS, and other galleries&nbsp;–&nbsp;including&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/17506/Galer%C3%ADa-Agustina-Ferreyra" target="_blank">Galería Agustina Ferreyra</a>, which has, for now, relocated to one of the rooms. Kuri and Mónica Manzutto, his wife and the gallery’s co-founder, own a farm, where they learned to grow different crops concomitantly so that they nurture each other. ‘We are planting seeds and watching them grow. Similarly, the accomplished artists are nurtured by the younger ones and vice versa,’ says Kuri.

Jorge Méndez Blake Galería&nbsp;OMR, Mexico City Through February 14, 2021Originally an architect,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7336/Jorge-M%C3%A9ndez-Blake" target="_blank">Jorge Méndez Blake&nbsp;</a>has made his work Nos sentamos, escuchamos, discutimos (We sit, we listen, we discuss) (2020) the focal point of his show of sculptures and murals. The piece, which shares its title with the exhibition, is a scaled-down replica of the Acropolis’s Theater of Dionysus in Athens. Blake, says gallery director Ana Paula De Haro, ‘analyzes the amphitheater as an architectural element.’ The murals, looking like color swatches in blue and reddish tints, bear utterances about politics, silence, and discussion, which De Haro describes as closure, showing what the artist has learned in the process of working on a history rooted in the Greek capital. They bring together poetry, democracy, tragedy, and comedy – all topics that have gained a renewed urgency in this time of crisis.

Francis Alÿs, Frida Escobedo, and On Kawara Galerie Nordenhake, Mexico City December 3, 2020–January 9, 2021The first exhibition at the Stockholm- and Berlin-based gallery’s new permanent outpost in Mexico City opens with a work by Frida Escobedo, the architect who designed the space. El Otro (2012–18) is made of 21 glass panes – taken from the windows of an iconic 1960s building in Mexico City (she bought them from its owner and paid to replace them). The building is now ‘practically in ruins,’ says gallery director Toni Sadurní Viñas, and the windows ‘show traces of all the activities that happened on this façade.’ Stickers, paint marks, and so on are still visible. The work is presented alongside&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10431/Francis-Al%C3%BFs" target="_blank">Francis Alÿs</a>’s Sunpath, Mexico City 20.05.99, 4:33 pm (1999), one of a series of photographs documenting a performance in which a group of people stood, aligned, in the shade of a huge flagpole. They ‘acted like a human sundial,’ Sadurní Viñas explains, ‘and reflected the ephemeral and the passage of time, marginal but extremely poetic.’ Sadurní Viñas’s words could also describe July 9, 1981 (1981), from&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10137/On-Kawara" target="_blank">On Kawara</a>’s ‘Today’ series, for which he painted the date of the day he was creating each work in white type against monochrome backgrounds. The three works, selected in dialogue with Escobedo, ‘pose three different kinds of calendars,’ Sadurní Viñas says. ‘The Kawara gives the clue as to how we may read them.’

Ana Mazzei Galeria Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo Through January 9, 2021‘A deluge of rock and incandescent debris befell the city,’ reads the text Ana Mazzei wrote to accompany her exhibition ‘Vesuvius’. It describes a hell that ‘lasted three days, and then, absolute silence.’ An awakening comes ‘nineteen centuries later,’ the text continues. Mazzei’s work hints at a well-known narrative, but her sculptures do not directly reference the eruption of the volcano that ruined Pompeii in 79 A.D. Even if the relationship between the artist’s text and the sculptures in the space is not clearly delineated, the groups of vertical and pigmented-wax-paint pieces are haunted by the silence she writes about. Four sculptures representing facets of a temple – Templo I, Templo - Face Oeste, Templo - Face Norte, and Templo 1 (all 2020) – are arranged in a square, suggesting a building with a hollow core, like a volcano, or the remnants of a story.

Paloma Bosquê Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo November 28, 2020–February 3, 2021In the past,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/27636/Paloma-Bosqu%C3%AA" target="_blank">Paloma Bosquê’</a>s work mainly involved found materials constructed into sculptures, but these new works rely on a new process. Using what the gallery describes as the artist’s ‘own recipe,’ Bosquê dissolves different-colored gypsum sulfates in water and mixes them with synthetic glue. This mixture is then added to natural materials, such as black cotton and banana-tree fiber, to shape the sculptures, which look like monochromatic abstracts. The show also includes a large-scale installation of wool soaked in sulfate minerals and molded to suggest bones or tree roots emerging from the floor, and two-dimensional works in which the fiber acts as a support. The palette is dark and monochromatic, giving the exhibition a sense of a unified aesthetic and goal – the expansion of Bosquê’s ongoing interest in matter and the way materials interact.

N.Date Galería&nbsp;Luisa Strina, São Paulo Through January 16, 2021‘In his tireless quest to rewrite art history,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8341/Mario-Garc%C3%ADa-Torres" target="_blank">Mario García Torres&nbsp;</a>has discovered in N.Date a precious contribution for Latin American art,’ says gallerist Luisa Strina. The gallery insists that N.Date is ‘an artist whose biographical data is largely unknown,’ sustaining an air of mystery around the exhibition, which is titled ‘Strange How Things Work Out’ and has been organized by García Torres. The works of this until-now-unknown artist are mostly small-scale, geometric abstractions, made using natural materials – jute, rattan, and occasionally bronze – and are all undated. It’s another point of contact with García Torres, who also famously doesn’t date his own works (marking them n.d., reminiscent of N.Date). Notwithstanding their intriguing origins, the works stand as wonderful tributes to Brazilian Modernism, which are, to borrow Strina’s words, ‘intimate in scale but vast in the scope of languages and human concerns that relate to us all.’

Artur Lescher Galeria Nara Roesler, Rio de Janeiro Through December 23, 2020For gallery partner Alexandre Roesler de Castro e Silva, the work of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7321/Artur-Lescher" target="_blank">Artur Lescher</a> ‘offers a profound sense of balance and gravity, creating a unique form of expression that invites viewers to evoke themes such as memory, movement, or space.’ This exhibition of new works dating from 2018 to 2020, titled ‘Inverso do infinito’ (The Inverse of the Infinite), references both art-historical precedents, especially the work of Romanian Modernist Constantin Brâncuși, as well as more ephemeral, ethereal themes. Graça # 04 / Vinci (2020), which Roesler points out is reminiscent of an hourglass, ‘confronts us with the passing of time, so inevitable and yet so remarkable to all of us.’Orit Gat is a writer based in London.&nbsp;Top image: kurimanzutto, 'Siembra',&nbsp;Biquini Wax EPS,&nbsp;Sa La Na, A Yuum, Iasis / Laissez Faire - Laissez Passer.&nbsp;2019. Courtesy of kurimanzutto and Biquini Wax EPS, Mexico City.&nbsp;

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