MASA and Luhring Augustine are delighted to announce their second collaborative exhibition highlighting the work of artists and designers from both gallery programs. Installed throughout MASA’s historic Mexico City space, the show opens February 4, 2025,and will remain on view through March 29.
Friendship, as Myriam Ben Salah has pointed out, is not a stable state. Like the works in this exhibition, friendship is a choice made freely, one which allows the contours of the individual and our distinct interests — whether institutional or personal — to embrace an identification, even admiration or affection, with someone considered other than oneself.
Across three rooms of MASA’s historic space in Mexico City are installed a trio of pairings of artists – Pipilotti Rist and Alma Allen; Eva LeWitt and Hector Esrawe; and Diego Singh and Renata Petersen. Although there are affinities between the works, the dialogues between artists from Mexico and their international counterparts are associative rather than didactic, and unexpected encounters among recognizable idiosyncrasies arise. In the work of Rist and Allen is a shared engagement with inner visions, collective consciousness, and extra-sensory perception; an interest in translating dreams that are once fantastical and familiar into the material. Similarly, both LeWitt and Esrawe make works that exist in a space between lightness and architecture, manipulating industrial materials into installations in which granular elements expand into a view, a horizon, or a cosmos. Renata Petersen and Diego Singh present here works in completely different mediums — blown glass and painting, respectively — and yet both approach figuration with obfuscation, imbuing a transcendental space with a libidinal crackle, the unabashedly human.
MASA’s gallery space was built as a country home in the 19th century. Throughout the 20th century, its prominent owner organized hundreds of renowned, eclectic gatherings that brought together artists, writers, and other notable figures. Continuing in this celebratory spirit and tradition, MASA and Luhring Augustine’s collaboration activates new dialogues between disparate voices across generations and genres.
ARTIST BIOS:
Eva LeWitt’s sculptures and installations are fabricated as much from space, light, and architecture as they are from the multitude of hand-altered commercial materials she employs. Mesh, silicone, sponges, and other quotidian store-bought elements are carefully dyed, cast, or stained, and are subsequently imbued with a softness and imperfection that was not present in their original mass-produced state.
Pipilotti Rist, a pioneer of spatial video art, was born in 1962 in Grabs, in the Swiss Rhine Valley on the Austrian border, and has been a central figure within the international art scene since the mid-1980s. Her artistic work has co-developed with technical advancements, from early single channel videos such as I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986) and Pickelporno (1992), to recent large-scale immersive video projections and digital manipulations like Sip My Ocean (1996) and Worry Will Vanish (2014). Throughout her work, Rist’s concepts are expansive—finding within the mind, senses, and body the possibility for endless discovery and poetical invention.
Diego Singh’s works are composed of layers of paint often developed over the span of years. Apparitions and silhouettes frequently emerge from the veils and latticework of mark and gesture; rendered in a loose and undefined outline, the identities of these figures are indiscernible. For Singh, this visual language captures a queer experience of obscuring and exposing elements of the self, emphasizing painting’s capacity to remain in a state of political and poetic tension, invention, and indeterminacy.
Spanning a wide range of materials, from bronze to stalagmite, Alma Allen’s works collapse in striking form both what is immediate and impossible. From sinuously thin curls to magmatic and tensile outpourings, Alma’s sculptures reflect both their singular process and unguarded expressions of bodily held sensation and wonder, while offering a “wry, patient, even violent cross-examination” of material and the “knotty, manifest language of the world,” as Christina Catherine Martinez wrote in Artforum. Alma lives in Tepoztlán, Mexico.
Héctor Esrawe is a prolific furniture and interior designer, architect, academic, and entrepreneur, living and working in Mexico City. His work reflects clear knowledge and understanding of materials, processes, techniques, and artisanal skills. Esrawe has a magnificent ability to — simply but abstractly — transform the shape and expression of natural materials, while being nurtured by Mexico’s rich artisan heritage, aiming for a timeless and honest creation.
Renata Petersen’s work addresses themes of religious and social character, not exempt from black humor. In the form of vignettes, with a close relationship to comics and cartoons, she produces satirical revisions to subjects with powerful repercussions in popular culture such as sects, urban legends, pornography and sexuality, and eschatology, working in production linked to traditional artisan techniques from Guadalajara, such as ceramic and blown glass.
