Utopías y Realidades

The Museo de Arte e Historia de Guanajuato, located in the city of León, presents through August 26, 2012 a new exhibition of works by grand masters of Latin American art, titled: Utopías y Realidades: Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo en la Colección FEMSA.

The exhibition includes 82 works of contemporary and modern art by 72 artists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Venezuela, Belgium, The Netherlands, the US, France, and England. The works are acquisitions made at the FEMSA Biennial in Monterrey and come from the company's artistic and cultural holdings.

Utopías y Realidades: Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo en la Colección FEMSA presents more works and artists than Colección FEMSA's former traveling exhibition Zoom Latinoamericano.

The curatorial goal is the unfolding of a visual world that reveals idealizations of the concept of Latin America and the construction of identities through the absorption of various avant-garde influences, the adoption of nationalistic icons and protagonists, and the insertion of such idealism into everyday-life themes.

The exhibition is divided into five thematic nuclei:

Routes / Displacements / Horizons takes as its starting point geographic formality and the idealization of landscapes. In this nuclei we find artists like David Alfaro Siqueiros, Guillermo Kuitca and Luiz Cruz-Azaceta.

Complicities explores formal, technical, and conceptual connections between colleagues, specific to periods in their careers. Among the artists included in this section are Joaquín Torres García, Rufino Tamayo, Carlos Mérida, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Luis Tomasello.

Characters and Self-Exiles includes self-portraits, national and Latin American icons, spirituality, mythology, and identity. Here are artists like Francis Alÿs, Eugenio Dittborn, José Bedia, Ernesto Pujol, and Julio Galán.

The Creative Imagination brings to the fore the first word of the exhibition's title: utopia. Surrealism and/or Abstract Expressionism have contradictory planes on which paintings by artists like Juan O'Gorman rest.

Image and Word, where the concept of words and the images that represent them also appeal to utopia. Different interpretations of literature generate different perspectives. Among the artists included here are Emilio Chapela and Iñaki Bonillas.

Source: Departamento de Comunicación Social – Forum Cultural Guanajuato