For its first exhibition of 2021, Museo Jumex galleries will be stripped down to their original design for Normal Exceptions: Contemporary Art in México. Drawing primarily from the Colección Jumex with additional works by invited artists and collaborators, the exhibition will feature more than 60 works by artists based in México, including those of international origin, and Mexican artists living and working abroad. The five month show is a survey of contemporary art in México, with several pieces from the Colección Jumex never exhibited in the museum or seen in the Americas such as Stefan Brüggemann, Jorge Méndez Blake and Chantal Peñalosa. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the first floor gallery will present three rotating collaborations with key organizations that have played a significant role in the formation of contemporary art in México including ZsONA MACO, inSite and SOMA ranging from new work from Mexico City based duo Rometti Costales to live performance art.
Curated by the museum’s curatorial team led by Chief Curator, Kit Hammonds, the exhibition’s title is inspired by a key term in micro-history—the study of history from the perspective of individuals and their encounters with authority—and proposes the idea of looking from a grassroots perspective upwards, rather than from the top down.
DANIELA ROSSELL, THIRD WORLD BLONDES (HAREM ROOM), 2002. LA COLECCIÓN JUMEX, MÉXICO.
“For Normal Exceptions, we looked at the entire Colección Jumex as a starting point, to highlight the development of art in Mexico over the last two decades,” noted Hammonds. “We also want to show these works in the larger context of Mexico’s multi-dimensional ecosystem of artistic practice, and to include collaborators as a way of creating conversations between the museum and its contemporaries.”
Museo Jumex’s second and third floors will feature a variety of works from the collection, many of which will be shown for the first time in the museum, joined by a selection of works by invited artists.
JORGE MÉNDEZ BLAKE THE CASTLE, 2007. LA COLECCIÓN JUMEX, MÉXICO. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND OMR GALLERY.
MARIO GARCÍA TORRES THIS PAINTING IS MISSING, THIS PAINTING HAS BEEN FOUND, 2006-ONGOING. LA COLECCIÓN JUMEX.
MARIANA CASTILLO DEBALL IT RISES OR FALLS…, 2006 LA COLECCIÓN JUMEX, MÉXICO.
IÑAKI BONILLAS ALL THE VERTICAL PHOTOGRAS OF THE J.R. PLAZA ARCHIVE, PHOTOGRAPHICALLY DOCUMENTED, 2004. LA COLECCIÓN JUMEX, MÉXICO. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
Exhibited for the first time in the Americas, Stefan Brüggemann’s (Mexican, b. 1975) Conceptual Decoration Silver and Black Wallpaper (2008) will span approximately 100 meters of a second-floor gallery wall. Despite its large scale, the two-word text “conceptual decoration” running across its surface appears small, presenting a series of contrasts and ironies between the ideas of concept versus decoration, art and design, work and support, and language and architecture. The ambiguity this provokes is a theme explored throughout the exhibition.
On view for the first time since its acquisition in 2010, Jorge Méndez Blake’s (Mexican, b. 1974) El castillo [The Castle] (2007) is a 14-meter-long brick wall that runs over a single copy of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle, distorting and disrupting the orderly rows of 3,000 bricks from which the work is constructed. The work touches on some of the key motifs explored in the exhibition, particularly the relationship of the individual to authority, as explored in Kafka’s novel and represented poetically by the artist in the interruption it makes to the structure above.
TERCERUNQUINTO REMOVAL AND REINSTALLATION OF THE NATIONAL COAT OF ARMS, 2008. LA COLECCIÓN JUMEX, MÉXICO.
Chantal Peñalosa (Mexican, b. 1987) has been constructing an archive of art from projects realized by the initiative inSite in public spaces in her native city of Tijuana. Having never seen the projects herself, her study and knowledge of them has played a formative role in her own practice. Creating clay models from her imagination and photographing the now empty locations where they were originally presented, Peñalosa aims to connect to these practices and to the places they temporarily transformed. This is the first presentation of the project in a museum after its showing in the artist’s independent space in Tijuana.
Throughout the run of the exhibition, the first-floor gallery will feature three different installations presented sequentially and curated in collaboration with organizations that have played a significant role in the formation of contemporary art in Mexico. The first will be co-organized with ZsONAMACO, Latin America’s largest art fair and a chief driver in bringing Mexican artists to the international art market. In collaboration with ZsONAMACO’s Artistic Director, Juan Canela, the installation will center on new work by the México City-based duo Rometti Costales that delves into the intersection of modern and ancient histories, beliefs, and practices.
The second installation and collaboration with Museo Jumex is inSite—which began as a cross-border public arts program in San Diego and Tijuana, and more recently ran Casa Gallina in México City, which engaged artists with various communities. In the last two years, under the curatorial direction of Andrea Torreblanca, inSite has been reflecting on its own artist legacy and its future through a themed journal putting forward critical and highly current issues impacting art and the public. These archival pieces form a script for live performances at Museo Jumex during the installation.
The third collaborative installation is with the independent art school SOMA, founded by artist Yoshua Okón in 2009, which has played a significant role in forging links between artists of different generations and in the development of a discourse that has become central to many emerging artists, through both their studio program and public events.
Normal Exceptions continues Museo Jumex’s year-long series of exhibitions highlighting works from the renowned Colección Jumex, one of the leading collections of Mexican art, and one of the most significant private collections of contemporary art in Latin America. Other artists in the exhibition include Iñaki Bonillas, Wendy Cabrera Rubio, Miguel Calderón y Yoshua Okón, Pia Camil, Abraham Cruz Villegas, Zhivago Duncan, Mario García Torres, Daniel Guzmán, Gabriel Kuri, Teresa Margolles, Damián Ontiveros Ramírez, Gabriel Orozco, Raúl Ortega Ayala, G. T. Pellizzi, Alejandra de la Puente, Santiago Sierra, Melanie Smith, Lake Verea and the collective Tercerunquinto.
