On View Now: Al Amigo Que No Me Salvó La Vida: Pinturas Mexicanas 1976-1991

MASA presents a revisitation of 1980s Mexican painting, centering work – some not previously on view this century – from artists who hovered between sincerity and provocation in meditations on devotion, melancholy, and bodily function. Rather than a regional variant of postmodernism, here the effort of confession is presented as a spiritual and aesthetic challenge in the face of political, tectonic, and existential crises. The exhibition investigates in defiant materiality a tenderness towards the visceral, and the anatomization of observation and sensation that lends itself to both eroticization and revelation. As the era’s leading Mexican critic Teresa del Conde (1938-2017) wrote, these are works that “allow us to apprehend with a certain irony the aesthetic sides of very serious things: beliefs, vices, childhood, sexuality, and what awaits towards the end.”