Latino artwork pops up
The putty-colored warehouse bearing a sign for the Fu Yuan International wholesaler on the northern fringes of Los Angeles’ Chinatown doesn’t look like a place you might stumble upon a work by Jesús Rafael Soto, the famed Venezuelan artist known for his finely rendered, mind-bending optical works. Or an installation of wooden totems by 20th century Uruguayan sculptor Francisco Matto. Not to mention the photographs of Mexico’s Lourdes Grobet, renowned for her images of Mexican wrestlers (and who currently has work on view at the Hammer Museum as part of “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-85.”)
But through the end of this month, this industrial site is serving as the temporary home for a pop-up art space called ProyectosLA, a collaboration with nearly two dozen well-known galleries from throughout Latin America, including OMR in Mexico City; Revolver Galería in Lima, Peru; and Galeria Nara Roesler, which maintains exhibition spaces in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, and New York.
The show, one of many Latin America-themed gallery projects being held in parallel with the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibitions across Southern California, was organized by independent curators Claudia Segura, who hails from Colombia, and Luiza Teixeira de Freitas, who lives in Lisbon.
“The notion of the border ... was a leitmotif of the show,” the curators say in an email. “[It] allowed us to intertwine concepts such as identity, syncretism, nationalism, indigenism, utopia, reality.”
In one massive room, a series of filmy, house-shaped silhouettes by Los Angeles artist Carmen Argote hovers near totems by Matto. In another, an assemblage by the contemporary Argentine collective Mondongo hangs near an installation of ceramics by Magali Lara, a Mexican artist whose works use language to explore the nature of intimacy.
Even as ProyectosLA mashes up geography, time periods, artistic movements and materials, it explores linkages. One room features paper art by Mexican avant-garde artist Ulises Carrión hanging alongside work by Brazilian Japanese sculptor Tomie Ohtake and a photobased installation by Chilean poet Raúl Zurita.
“All of them dissimilar artists, from different periods of time, but all interested in abstraction,” Segura and De Freitas write. “They compose a beautiful narrative that questions borders of nationalities, times and formats.”
To visit all 18 galleries during any other time would require plane tickets to Buenos Aires; New York; Guatemala City; Sao Paulo; Mexico City; Lima; Santiago, Chile; and Bogota, Colombia. ProyectosLA makes the art-gazing infinitely easier.