Silvia Gruner

Last updated

Silvia Gruner
Born1959 (age 62–63)
Mexico City, Mexico
NationalityMexican
Known forSculpture, Video, Performance

Silvia Gruner is a Mexican artist born to a family of Jewish Holocaust survivors. [1]

Contents

Biography

Gruner received her Fine Arts Degree from Bezalel Academy of Art & Design (1978-1982) and pursued her master's degree in Fine Arts at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston (1984-1986). [2]

After completing her master's degree Gruner had her first solo exhibition, Conversaciones con un loto azul, (1986) in Boston. Additionally, at the beginning of her career, Gruner began making short films and video performances that she recorded using a Super 8 camera. [3] Her work is said to be heavily influenced by second wave feminism and post conceptual work, which caused critical debate in Mexico during the 1990s. [4] [ failed verification ] Gruner's art is unique and personal as she bases many of her pieces on her own personal experiences and culture. In addition, she explores these different ideas of nationality, identity, and feminism through many different mediums. She experiments a lot with film, photography, performance, and interactive art installations in order to appeal to a mass audience. [5] Silvia Gruner is recognized as one of the most original artists of her time in Latin America and is praised for having created a new vocabulary in Mexican contemporary art. [6]

Works

La mitad del Camino/The Middle of the Road, 1994

Gruner wanted to create art directly on a part of the border fence that ran between the Colonia Libertad in Tijuana and San Diego. In this art instillation she installed more than 100 small figures of the Aztec goddess, Tlazoltéotl. [7] The goddess is seen as a symbol of fertility and motherhood, hence why Gruner crafted the goddess in a position of giving birth. It is left up to interpretation as to what Tlazoltéotl, is supposed to signify here at the border as some believe it signifies rebirth and it meant to be comforting to illegal immigrants and a symbol of reassurance that those migrating will not forget their roots and culture. [8] However, others believe that since Tlazoltéotl is stuck on the border in the middle of childbirth, it can also raise a feeling of uncertainty during this significant transitional period where you are between the know and unknown. [9]

Don't fuck with the past, you might get pregnant, 1994

Gruner created an installation with a series of 16 photographic prints that depict small clay figures. Each Ektacolor (chromogenic development) print measures 20x24 inches and brings the overall installation to a size of 108x96 inches. [10] She continues to explore the theme of time in this piece and its close entanglement with Mexican culture. She explains how in the Mexican culture people are taught to look at the past in a conservative way and uses this work to address the parallel between culture and different Mexican taboos. She not only challenges this taboo but counters gender binaries by using this piece to deal with the masculine and the feminine simultaneously. [11] In addition, Gruner purposely enters these images with a disruptive attitude in order to powerfully inhabit this unknown territory. Through the use of everyday objects she demonstrates how this piece is deeply rooted in the Mexican culture and shows not only their history but the people themselves within the art. [12]

How to look at Mexican Art, 1995

In How to look at Mexican Art , Gruner pictures her fingers through a punctured molcajete on top of a piece of bright red plastic. A molcajete is a stone tool used to grind different items and are typically associated with indigenous Mexican culture. Molcajetes remain popular today as they are used throughout Latin America to grind different foods. In the photographic diptych, the first picture shows her grasping the molcajete from the top and then moves to put her fingers through the hole from the bottom. Through the use of incorporating her own body in her art it shows how personal this piece is and how she is challenging her culture and Mexican heritage. Additionally, the molcajete contrasts against the bright red plastic can be seen as a contrast between the past and the modern present. [13] The molcajete is also very significant and personal in this piece as it belonged to Gruner's childhood nana, or nursemaid which shows how it has been used by various women and is full of tradition. The ambiguity in this piece is meant to leave viewers with the expectations of typical 'Mexican Art'. [14]

Centinela (Sentinel), 2007

Centinela is a video in which the artist has her head shaved from recent cancer treatments and stands in front of a modernist fountain created by Mathias Goeritz, Ricardo Legorreta, and Isamu Noguchi. [13] Gruner explains how in this piece nothing really happens but simultaneously everything happens. In the video, the subject remains still, completely immobile yet everything in her surroundings continue. The water continues to thrust back and forth, the cars continue to pass by, the environment is dynamic. [15] Once again, through the inclusion of herself in her own work it shows how Gruner explores her own personal life and in this case deals with the emotions of her battle with cancer. Additionally, the title 'Sentinel' refers to a soldier who stands to keep watch as she is doing in the video.

Hemisferios/Hemispheres, 2016

Silvia Gruner's work Hemispheres was aimed to introduce Gruner's work to New York's audience, and explores the dichotomy between the personal and collective. It is an installation of a series of her work and a video interview but the main piece takes place in the garden. [16] This exhibition contains an arrangement of bright red thread, spread throughout two gardens. The piece is meant to exhibit Gruner's brain and the different thoughts and ideas being dispersed throughout the space. Her goal was to express the complexity of thoughts and feelings, in a world so complicated. [17] It is representative of how everything in her life is connected yet it constructed by different fragments. The exhibition highlights her works such as The films Sand (1986) and Sentinel (2007), How to Look at Mexican Art (1995), Bauhaus for Monkeys (2011), and 500 kilos of Impotence (or possibility) (1998). [18] Overall, the exhibition is meant to highlight over 30 years of her work and the dichotomies between a "psychological and subjective dimension, and a political and cultural one." [16]

Honors and awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Performance art</span> Artwork created through actions of an artist or other participants

Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a public in a fine art context in an interdisciplinary mode. Also known as artistic action, it has been developed through the years as a genre of its own in which art is presented live. It had an important and fundamental role in 20th century avant-garde art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hito Steyerl</span>

Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, moving image artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics, together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Escobedo</span> Mexican sculptor (1934–2010)

Helen "Elena" Escobedo was a Mexican sculptor and installation artist who has had work displayed all over the world from Mexico, Latin America, the United States, and Canada to the United Kingdom, (Germany), as well Israel and New Zealand.

Miss Lupita project

Miss Lupita is a project based in Mexico City with the aim of reviving the traditional craft of Lupita dolls. The dolls originated in the late 18th and early 19th century as a way to cheaply copy more expensive imported dolls for poorer families. The dolls are made from a very hard form of papier-mâché called “cartonería” which is also used to create alebrijes and skeletal figures for Day of the Dead. However, the craft has waned with the only workshops making and selling them located in Celaya in the state of Guanajuato, mostly as collector’s items. The project’s aim was to create more contemporary designs through a series of free workshops to the public. The resulting dolls have been displayed in Mexico City, Japan and Portugal and featured in a number of Mexican publications.

Susana Rodríguez is a Mexican visual artist who has had a number of solo exhibitions and has participated in various group exhibitions. Her work often consists of installations.

Nayda Collazo-Llorens is a visual artist whose work spans drawing, painting, printmaking, installation, video, and public art. Her work combines images, sound, and text to investigate how the mind processes information. While themes of displacement, alienation, and synchronicity permeate her videos and interventions, her text-based works explore post-alphabetic communication, hyperconnectivity and “noise” as systems of information. Collazo-Llorens is the granddaughter of the Puerto Rican literary critic, linguist, and lexicographer, Washington Llorens. Though born and raised in Puerto Rico, she attended college and graduate school in the United States, receiving her BFA in printmaking and graphic design from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1990 and her MFA from New York University in 2002. She has taught at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University School of Art, Kalamazoo College, and, from fall 2014 to spring 2017, held the position of Stuart and Barbara Padnos Distinguished Artist in Residence at Grand Valley State University.

Rosina Cazali

Rosina Cazali is a Guatemalan art critic and independent curator. She serves as an advisory committee member for CIFO. Cazali currently works as a columnist for El Periódico, a Guatemalan newspaper. She recently co-curated the 2014 Guatemalan Biennial, XIX Bienal de Arte Paiz, along with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Anabella Acevedo and Pablo José Ramírez.

Kimsooja South Korean conceptual artist

Kimsooja is a South Korean, multi-disciplinary conceptual artist based in New York, Paris, and Seoul. Her practice combines performance, film, photo, and site-specific installation using textile, light, and sound. Kimsooja's work investigates questions concerning the conditions of humanity, while engaging issues of aesthetics, culture, politics, and the environment. Her principle of ‘non-doing’ and ‘non-making,’ which follows a conceptual and structural investigation of performance through modes of mobility and immobility, inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor.

Rocío Boliver

Rocío Boliver is a Mexican performance artist who creates body art about the repression of women in Mexico. In 1992, Boliver began her career as a performance artist reading her porno-erotic writings. Boliver has a background in video and Mexican theatre. From 1994 to 2007 she worked in theatre projects, performance and contemporary art, collaborating with the playwright Juan José Gurrola. Boliver has performed at a variety of venues such as museums, raves, universities, galleries, activist meetings and TV programs. An underground cultural icon in Mexico, Boliver is part of a Goth-art scene, and has presented works at alternative forums such as the Sadomasochism National Festival. Boliver's work has been presented in North America, South America, Europe and Asia.

Noemí Ramírez is a Mexican visual artist, whose work has been recognized with several honors including membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.

Julieta Aranda is a conceptual artist that lives and works in Berlin and New York City. She received a BFA in filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts (2001) and an MFA from Columbia University (2006), both in New York. Her explorations span installation, video, and print media, with a special interest in the creation and manipulation of artistic exchange and the subversion of traditional notions of commerce through art making.

María Evelia Marmolejo Colombian artist (born 1958)

María Evelia Marmolejo is a Colombian radical feminist performance artist, later based in Madrid and New York City. She is credited by the Colombian scholar María Lovino with staging the first work of feminist performance art in Colombia, in 1981. She is best known for discussing controversial themes such as political oppression, feminism, environment, and socioeconomic issues within her performances.

Vera Chaves Barcellos is a Brazilian artist and educator. She was featured in the Radical Women show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2018.

Yolanda Andrade (photographer) Mexican photographer

Yolanda Andrade is a Mexican photographer.

Maria Adela Diaz is a Guatemalan contemporary artist. She was born in 1973, during the Guatemalan Civil War. She mentions that, as a Guatemalan citizen, she feels that political issues are a part of her identity and that a lot of her and her family's experiences are reflected through her artwork. Diaz is a self taught artist as well as a graphic designer, and has worked in the press, publicity, and media. While she does not consider herself a feminist, many of her works have been displayed in feminist exhibitions; she considers her work feminine because it is work done by a woman.

Tania Candiani is a Mexican artist known for her interdisciplinary, large-scale, multimedia installations. In 2011, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

Sarah Minter was a Mexican filmmaker and artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">María La Ribot</span>

María José Ribot, known as La Ribot, is a dancer, choreographer and visual artist. Her projects are based on movement, the body and her own experiences in dance, but she also uses other practices, systems and materials that her concepts generate. She is the main interpreter of her works while she also often creates the costumes, objects and scenery. With more than 45 works under her belt, including choreographies, installations and videos, La Ribot continues to find interest in living art, in the human body and its capacity for poetic, subversive and political expression. She has received the 2000 National Dance Award and the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts 2016 – both granted by the Ministry of Culture of Spain – and the Culture Award of the Community of Madrid in Visual Arts 2018. In September 2019, she received the Swiss Grand Award for Dance granted by the Swiss Confederation in recognition of her artistic work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eli Bartra</span>

Eli Bartra is a feminist philosopher and a pioneer in researching women and folk art in different places of the world, but particularly, in Mexico. She is the daughter of the writers Anna Murià and Agustí Bartra, two Catalan refugees in Mexico.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Silvia Rivas</span> Argentine visual artist

Silvia Rivas is an Argentine visual artist known for her multi-channel video installations. In Latin America she is considered a precursor in the area of expanded video. Her work is characterized by the crossing of materialities and technologies in which she uses both electronic devices and ancestral techniques. Her production is organized in thematic series of video installations, drawings, photographs or objects. Interested in revealing the metaphorical power of different materialities, she uses the electronic medium and the moving image to record stillness, the imminent and the subjective perception of time.

References

  1. ↑ "Silvia Gruner | Radical Women digital archive". Hammer Museum. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "Silvia Gruner". cifo.org. Retrieved 4 February 2019.
  3. ↑ "Galería de la Raza: Silvia Gruner". galeriadelaraza.org. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
  4. ↑ "ArtNexus – Press Releases". artnexus.com. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
  5. ↑ ArteEnConstruccion, arte, vida y contexto III , retrieved 4 February 2019
  6. ↑ "Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner – Exhibition at Americas Society in New York". ArtRabbit. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
  7. ↑ "The Middle of the Road". library.ucsd.edu. 1994. Retrieved 4 February 2019.
  8. ↑ Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary. Walls and border art: the politics of art display. Journal of Borderlands Studies, Taylor Francis (Routledge), 2012, 27 (2), pp.213-228. <10.1080/08865655.2012.687216>.
  9. ↑ "Make America Mexico Again: 10 Artworks About Immigration and the Border". Artspace. Retrieved 4 February 2019.
  10. ↑ Distant relations = Cercanias distantes = Clann i gCéin : Chicano Irish Mexican art and critical writing. Ziff, Trisha., Lippard, Lucy R., Perez, Pilar., Garza, Javier de la., Kindness, John, 1951-, Valadez, John R. Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press. 1995. ISBN   0964642611. OCLC   34020500.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  11. ↑ Gabara, Esther (2008). Errant modernism : the ethos of photography in Mexico and Brazil. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press. ISBN   9780822343400. OCLC   209334149.
  12. ↑ "Silvia Gruner". v1.zonezero.com. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
  13. 1 2 "Silvia Gruner at Americas Society". artforum.com. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
  14. ↑ Gruner, Silvia (1998). Silvia Gruner, reliquias. Centro de la Imagen (Mexico). Mexico: [Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes]. ISBN   9701810996. OCLC   41049173.
  15. ↑ ArteEnConstruccion (5 February 2009), arte, vida y contexto III , retrieved 11 March 2019
  16. 1 2 "Americas Society Presents Solo Exhibition of Goundbreaking Mexican Artist Silvia Gruner". AS/COA. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
  17. ↑ "Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook by Silvia Gruner". AS/COA. Retrieved 4 February 2019.
  18. ↑ "Americas Society Presents Solo Exhibition in New York of Groundbreaking Mexican Artist Silvia Gruner". MarketWatch. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.