Galerie Lelong is pleased to present a selection of internationally recognized artists at the 2017 edition of Zona Maco. The booth demonstrates the gallery’s ongoing commitment to artists from Latin America—having represented some of its vital figures since the early 1990s—and cross-generational international artists from Australia, France, Spain, and the United States.
Artists previously exhibited in Mexico include Alfredo Jaar, Cildo Meireles, Ana Mendieta, and Jaume Plensa. Central to the booth is Jaar’s seminal work A Logo for America (1987-2014) (2016), based on a 2014 iteration of an animation that Jaar originally created in 1987 for an electronic billboard in Times Square, New York. The piece continues to challenge the ethnocentrism of the United States. Jaar, who was recently included in Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today at Fundación Jumex, screened the work at Mexico City’s Auditorio Nacional in 2016. Meireles’ conceptual work Espaços virtuais: Cantos XI (1967-68/2014), which was exhibited in his major retrospective at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in 2009-10, consists of a corner within a corner using three planes to define a figure in space. Mendieta, who has been part of several recent group exhibitions in the region and was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey in 1999, which travelled to the Museo Tamayo in 2000, found a deeply personal connection to the region and its culture during multiple trips to Mexico beginning in 1971. Mendieta created a significant portion of her work in Mexico, including her renowned Silueta series and Burial Pyramid (1974), where her breathing slowly unearths her body from beneath a bed of rocks.
On view by Plensa, who was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Centro Cultural de España, Mexico City, in 2002, is the sculpture White Forest (Isabella) (2015), a contemporary portrait of nascent womanhood. Standing near is Zilia Sánchez’s Troyanas, políptico (1990), an abstraction of corporeal forms. Together, their works highlight the sensuality of painted, sculptural surfaces related to the body and human yearning. Nancy Spero’s historical Codex Artaud series, most recently exhibited during the last Venice Biennale in 2015, combines collage, drawing, and textual excerpts of writing by the French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud. Spero appropriated Artaud’s writings as a metaphor for her own suffering as well as the sentiments of alienation she endured, particularly as a woman artist.
Etel Adnan, McArthur Binion, Sarah Cain, Rosemary Laing, and Kate Shepherd’s work, rarely seen in the region, invite critical transnational dialogues between the familiar and the unknown, formal and experimental techniques, as well as personal and philosophical inquiries. Artists such as Adnan and Laing explore the inherently political undertones offered by depictions of landscapes, nature, and place. Cain explores new territory and dimensions in painting, alongside Shepherd, who similarly investigates spatial complexity and abstraction of line. Finally, McArthur Binion continues his signature application of oil paint stick on personal documents in new paintings from his DNA: Seasons series, where he explores the use of new colors.
