Exhibition Mitos de Fundación: Costa Rican Artists Collective

Many are the artists who have found the main preoccupations and thematic repertoires for their work in ancient mythologies. Mitos de Fundación, a collective show at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte Roma, offers a reflection about the permanent reinforcement between myth and contemporary art through the work of four Costa Rican artists. The exhibition is presented as part of an exchange between MUCA and the TEOR/éTica Foundation, and brings together the work of Costa Rican artists Alberto Hernández, Priscilla Monge, Joaquín Rodríguez del Paso, and Karla Solano. Artists who differ in terms of their techniques and topics, but coincide in their ability to dismount or question some visions of the so-called "Central American Switzerland." José Alberto Hernández presents his photographic series RIP, Retratos Inconclusos Policiales (2011). This work handles police portraiture from its reverse side and proposes a blurred image indeterminate in its particular features. Priscilla Monge interrogates Costa Rica¿s supposedly peaceful, shiny, immaculate, transparent past in Fuente (2009) and Almohada (2011), exploring the irregularities found in spaces we assume to be safe, placid, or aseptic through the evocation of blood. The denial and subjugation of our gaze is what Karla Solano explores in A ciegas (2011) and En la mira (2011): an intervention on the façade of the MUCA building. Finally, Leg Godt (2011), by Joaquín Rodríguez del Paso, evokes the image of pre-Columbian constructions through the surprising presentation of a Lego-shaped Chac Mool. With Leg Godt, which in the Danish language means "play well," Rodríguez del Paso revisits a work he first conceived in 1996, comprised of a series of similarly shaped small sculptures that reflected on issues of authorship, legitimacy, and originality, while developing a parodic view of his own oeuvre. Mitos de Fundación will remain open to the public through October 30th.