ExhibitionMarch 4, 2022
"The Comedy of Art" by Pablo Helguera
From February 10 to May 8, the exhibition "The Comedy of Art" by Pablo Helguera will be on view at the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, in Cuenca, Spain, and it is trusted to the Juan March Foundation.
Artist, writer, and educator Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) has been based in New York for several decades, where he has worked in the education departments of institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA. His career has allowed him to become an "amateur anthropologist" and to observe from the inside a cultural ecosystem that is complex due to its diversity of actors (museums, galleries, curators, critics, and collectors) and social interactions (exhibitions, openings, fairs, biennials).
The exhibition's title, "The Comedy of Art," announces the prominence of humor, one of the most characteristic ingredients of Pablo Helguera's work that is generally scarce in the art world. In 2008 Helguera began to use social media to publish his "Artoons" (a word that comes from the conjunction of "art" and "cartoon"), caricatures that unite text and image and suppose an exercise of kind self-criticism that, made with irony and intelligence, never falls into the temptation of sarcasm.
"The Comedy of Art" presents eighty reproductions of "Artoons" selected from among the already known works by the Mexican artist, plus 15 more originals made for the exhibition, which share the museum's space with the permanent collection of modern and contemporary Spanish art gathered by the museum institution.
A 216-page catalog complements the exhibition with 155 "Artoons" organized as a glossary and two essays by curator and writer Gerardo Mosquera and Manuel Fontán del Junco.
Artist, writer, and educator Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) has been based in New York for several decades, where he has worked in the education departments of institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA. His career has allowed him to become an "amateur anthropologist" and to observe from the inside a cultural ecosystem that is complex due to its diversity of actors (museums, galleries, curators, critics, and collectors) and social interactions (exhibitions, openings, fairs, biennials).
The exhibition's title, "The Comedy of Art," announces the prominence of humor, one of the most characteristic ingredients of Pablo Helguera's work that is generally scarce in the art world. In 2008 Helguera began to use social media to publish his "Artoons" (a word that comes from the conjunction of "art" and "cartoon"), caricatures that unite text and image and suppose an exercise of kind self-criticism that, made with irony and intelligence, never falls into the temptation of sarcasm.
"The Comedy of Art" presents eighty reproductions of "Artoons" selected from among the already known works by the Mexican artist, plus 15 more originals made for the exhibition, which share the museum's space with the permanent collection of modern and contemporary Spanish art gathered by the museum institution.
A 216-page catalog complements the exhibition with 155 "Artoons" organized as a glossary and two essays by curator and writer Gerardo Mosquera and Manuel Fontán del Junco.
