CHICAGO.- Over the last ten years, Mexico City has become a thriving hub of artistic activity. A daring young generation of artists has developed a new vocabulary that embraces non-traditional materials as well as video, photography, and performance, with a love of conceptual art. This summer, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City from June 23 to September 2, 2007 to explore the work of these significant and creative young artists.

Unlike recent surveys of Latin American art or regional overviews of art from Mexico, Escultura Social focuses on art that combines popular culture with a conceptual style that can be humorous, macabre, and imaginative in pushing the boundaries of art. This exhibition is not defining a “movement” or looking at a panorama of artists working in Mexico, instead, it includes innovative work made primarily in the last two years that has had a significant impact outside of Mexico by artists who formed a community in Mexico City and have often collaborated on projects together.

Escultura Social is curated by MCA Assistant Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm who based the show's theme on German performance artist Joseph Beuys’s idea of social sculpture, which she translated into the Spanish as escultura social. She explains, "The works are all socially engaged; they draw connections between people, animals and nature; they revisit conceptual practices/actions from the 1960s; and promote a demystified and democratic idea of artmaking. In addition, the meaning of the images, objects, and actions are at the crux of these artists’ works and the exhibition provides an opportunity to showcase their recent developments."

Influenced by twentieth-century art historical movements such as conceptualism, “actions” and “happenings,” the work also refers to aspects of popular culture -- television, music, advertising, or flea markets -- and its history, urban life, and current political issues, but in a fresh new way.

Mexico's long political climate of oppression and corruption set the stage for unorthodox, collective, and “do-it-yourself” art practices in the 1990s. For example, in 1994, young artists Yoshua Okon and Miguel Calderon opened an exhibition space at a former bakery in Mexico City -- La Panaderia -- which was a gathering place for ten years for numerous artists, writers, and curators from Mexico and abroad. This and other collective efforts such as Temistocles44 and La Torre de los Vientos created an audience and forum for discussions about work that broke from tradition. An international dialogue has been crucial to its development, with several artists studying or participating in group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.

The Escultura Social exhibition includes site-specific, performative, and ephemeral projects in addition to videos, photographs, and installations. The complete list of artists includes: Maria Alós, Carlos Amorales, Julieta Aranda, Gustavo Artigas, Stefan Brüggemann, Miguel Calderón, Fernando Carabajal, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Dr. Lakra, Mario Garcia-Torres, Daniel Guzmán, Pablo Helguera, Gabriel Kuri, Nuevos Ricos, Yoshua Okón, Damian Ortega, Fernando Ortega, Pedro Reyes, Los Super Elegantes, and the architect Fernando Romero.

Artists: Maria Alós (Mexican/American, b. 1973) Lives and works in Mexico City. Alós is known for performances that often take place in public spaces, such as Grand Central Station. She also stages events in museums that act as an institutional critique, revealing unwritten rules of how art is displayed, collected and viewed. For the MCA, Alós creates Welcome/Farewell in which several performers recite a script saying hello and goodbye to the visitors during the preview and members openings of the exhibition.

Carlos Amorales (Mexican, b. 1970) Lives and works in Mexico City and Amsterdam. Amorales has moved away from his “lucha-libre” style wrestling performances, for which he became wellknown, toward a body of computer animations and graphic work based on a vast image bank that he calls a “liquid archive.” Amorales also collaborates with musicians and composers and has co-founded an artist collective/record label called Nuevos Ricos.

Julieta Aranda (Mexican, b. 1975) Lives and works in New York and Berlin. Most of Aranda’s work operates outside the realm of art objects, instead creating video rental stores, newspapers, and graffiti, involving the ethos of a particular site.

Gustavo Artigas (Mexican, b. 1970) Lives and works in Mexico City. In his videos and live actions that often evoke visceral reactions in viewers, Artigas directs performances that range from a football and soccer game being played on the same field to a motorcycle driving through a museum. He is developing a new work, Ball Game, in collaboration with an at-risk youth summer basketball league for this exhibition.

Stefan Brüggemann (Mexican, b. 1975) Lives and works in Mexico City and London. Working with text in various manifestations including neon and vinyl applied to the wall, Brüggemann examines how its meaning is brought into question when isolated into succinct and ambiguous phrases. Brüggemann's vinyl and neon texts recall the work of Joseph Kosuth, but with a more sardonic approach.

Miguel Calderon (Mexican, b. 1971) Lives and works in Mexico City. Working in a variety of media including painting, photography, sculpture, and more recently video, Calderon’s interest in popular culture and his childhood fascinations with animals have become his subjects.

Fernando Carabajal (Mexican, b. 1973) Lives and works in Mexico City. Employing a poetic and ambiguous sensibility, Carabajal takes materials from his studios to create miniature galaxies of the artist’s imagination.

Abraham Cruzvillegas (Mexican, b. 1968) Lives and works in Paris. Cruzvillegas creates elegant sculptures from everyday materials that relate specifically to the locations of his art practice, employing the legacy of Duchamp’s technique of the readymade.

Dr. Lakra (Mexican, b. 1972) Lives and works in Mexico City. Dr. Lakra is a tattoo artist who transforms idealized figures and advertisements from 1950’s Mexican magazines, pin-up girls and wrestlers, by “tattooing” them with ink snakes, demons, spiders, and the faces of pouting vixens. His graffiti-like defacements politicize the relative innocence of images of a romanticized past, combining a kitschy erotica with elements of ancient ritual and hallucinogenic visions in his collages.

Mario Garcia-Torres (Mexican, b. 1975) Lives and works in Los Angeles. Mario Garcia-Torres’ practice is concerned with rethinking history and more specifically about calling attention to art historical moments and conceptual works for which the artist reconsiders their significance.