Teresa Serrano
dal 20/3/2015 al 14/6/2015
Segnalato da
20/3/2015
Teresa Serrano
Museo Amparo, Ciudad de Puebla
A comprehensive survey spanning 35 years of her career. The conceptual and formal aspects of her work appear forcefully with almost 100 works distributed through six galleries, including rarely seen drafts as well as 17 videos.
curated by Berta Sichel
The self-titled retrospective of Mexican artist Teresa Serrano is a comprehensive survey spanning 35 years of her career as an artist, and marks her first exhibition in a museum in Mexico. The conceptual and formal aspects of her work appear forcefully with almost 100 works distributed through six galleries, including rarely seen drafts as well as seventeen videos that will be screened in the auditorium. Each room musters and conceptually connects related works from distinct series, epochs, and materials, manifesting the boundless and multi-faceted oeuvre of Serrano, who humbly started making charcoal studies of her own children who sat quietly in the living room of her home. The works presented embody her commitment to her private convictions as well as her openness to the external world.
The exhibition begins as she breaks with her past as a wife and mother, moving to New York in 1982. A decisive moment in her life, it had an enormous impact on her career. “I remember going into a gallery and seeing, instead of canvases, an installation …made with pigments that smelled of spicy curry.” recalls Serrano. Her experiences soon motivated her to stop painting as well as to unlock the “feel for the third dimension.” Some of the first series of small-format sculptures embodies the time when she “decided to be Teresa Serrano and go live alone.” The exhibition also gathers works related to fertility (sculptures from the Goddess of Fertility or the Umbilical Cord series among others) where she uses fabrics, stainless steel, ceramic, and mirrors to express what is extremely close to her. “I am a woman who has had six children and maintains a close bond with them. I knew about motherhood, and it was the easiest topic to begin with. “
Not exclusively, women as leitmotif appear repeatedly: In the knitted and embroidered pieces or videos such as Glass Ceiling - a jargon from the business world, meaning that upper echelons of large corporations are inaccessible to them. It wasn´t her intention to be a feminist. “As things turned out I was classified as one, and I accepted it.” This label came because of her trajectory in search of a vital aspiration: “to have my rights validated.” An exhibition in her home country is probably one of the vertices of this process.
Berta Sichel
Museo Amparo will publish a monographic catalog of the works of Teresa Serrano with texts by Gela Segovia, Berta Sichel, Raphael Rubinstein, Maarten Bertheux, and Karen Cordero Reiman, among others.
Teresa Serrano
Multidisciplinary artist born in Mexico City in 1936. For more than 30 years she has lived between Mexico and New York, and her works have been presented individually and collectively in Spain, Italy, Japan, China and the United States, especially in New York. She has participated in several art biennials: in Havana, Cuba, and Johannesburg, South Africa. She is presenting for the first time her complete works at Museo Amparo.
Image: Goddess of Fertility, Hierro, fibra de vidrio y alambre de luz, 1993
Museo Amparo
2 Sur 708, Historic District, Puebla, Puebla. C.P. 72000 Mexico
Open Wednesday through Monday 10 am to 6 pm
Wednesday to Sunday
$35.00 General public
$25.00 Students/teachers with ID
Monday: Free admission