Pablo Helguera .- Teléfono descompuesto
08/Jun/2024 - 13/Jul/2024
Espacio Mínimo gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of the mexican artist PABLO HELGUERA in Madrid. Teléfono descompuesto (Chinese Whispers) brings together a group of works that serve as an introduction to Helguera’s work, which focuses on themes such as sociological observation and satirical reflection on the world of arts, language, autobiography and memory, in formats from drawing to performance.
Teléfono descompuesto takes its title from a popular children’s game in Mexico that consists of transmitting a message orally, which is transformed as it is transmitted. This game in Spain is known as “Teléfono escacharrado” or “Teléfono estropeado”, the English version is “Chinese whispers” or just “Telephone”. In this group of works the artist, highly aware of the communication processes of art, seeks to inhabit and alter its formats to produce direct, self-reflective and/or self-critical messages, often simultaneously.
His long experience in art pedagogy in various museums and institutions is evident in his work, providing ideas linked to communication and observation of social dynamics in art. The exhibition is structured around four proposals from his kaleidoscopic artistic practice. The representative artoons series, started in 2008, of ink drawings that reproduce the format of the cartoons – vignettes – of the New Yorker magazine known as single panel, consisting of an image with a caption, in this case making specific references to the ironies and paradoxes of the contemporary art world. Furthermore, The Arlington Heights Suite collage series, in which he uses fragments of texts and illustrations from used books to create a personal diary, is a practice that he has been doing every night since 2007. Currently the series contains more than 22,000 works. A selection of these collages dialogues with the Tornasoles series. Kinetic sculptures formally inspired by this enormous corpus and in turn refer us to Lygia Clark’s Bugs, questioning the institutionality of Art and its reception systems.
Finally, a new series of drawings dedicated to the work of Ana Mendieta is presented, entitled No hay pasado original que redimir (There is no original past to redeem) consisting of a letter written by Helguera for the artist. In it, he reflects on the conditions of the Latin American artist in the United States and the way in which he, as an artist, must confront memory and history, as Helguera writes in the letter, “like amanuenses of the collective unconscious.”
His work focuses on topics that range between history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, which he deals with through varied formats such as reading, exhibition strategies in museums, musical performances and written fiction.
PABLO HELGUERA (Ciudad de México, 1971), cultural pedagogue and writer who lives and works in New York. He has presented his work in multiple museums and international biennials in Latin America, Europe and Asia, including Manifesta, the Liverpool, Havana and Performa biennials. In Mexico he has shown his work in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Museum of Modern Art and Museo Jumex, as well as in the Enrique Guerrero gallery, in Mexico City, and in Spain at the Juan March Foundation (Palma de Mallorca and Museum of abstract art in Cuenca) among many others. In 2009 he presented an individual performance at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid (performance Revólver, 2009). In 2023 he exhibited his work at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Kiosk in the city of Ghent, Belgium, and PROA 21 in Buenos Aires, among others.
The project The School of Panamerican Unrest (2003-2006) is considered a pioneer in the field of social interaction art. He has been awarded several international art fellowships and awards, such as the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Creative Capital Grant, as well as the first participatory art prize of the Emilia Romagna (Bologna) region in Italy. Since 1991 he has worked in different contemporary art museums, such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York or the MoMA. He is currently a professor at the College of the Performing Arts at the New School in New York. In 2010 he was elected pedagogical curator of the 8th Mercosur Biennial, held in 2011 in Porto Alegre (Brazil).
