MEYER*KAINER curated by Gaby Cepeda
„PLAY MODE“

Gaby Cepeda (b. Mexico, 1985) is a writer, art critic and curator whose work grapples with counter-humanism, technology, feminism, accelerationism and art labor. She has an MA in Art History / Contemporary Art, graduated with Honorary Mention, from UNAM Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and a BA in Photography from UANL Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. She studied at UNTREF Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero and participated in the 2013 Artists and Curators Program at Universidad Torcuato DiTella in Buenos Aires. She was a Guest Professor at the Royal Institute of Arts in Stockholm. She has curated and participated in exhibitions at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Sala Luis Miró Quesada Garland in Lima, Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Whitebox Art Center in New York and at the Transart Triennale in Berlin. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, ArtReview, Rhizome, Frieze, Terremoto, among other publications. She lives and works in Mexico City.

Gallery Meyer Kainer is pleased to announce “PLAY MODE”, an exhibition by Argentinian artist Ad Minoliti, showing a group of pieces selected from different bodies of work. 

 

Ad Minoliti is well known for an expansive practice that makes use of painting, digital collage, sculpture, murals, installation and participative environments, coming together to articulate a complex critique of our current modes of domination, specifically the binary systems that regulate the human experience. Her work instead seeks to imagine alternative modes of existence concerned with centering empathy and collaboration. 

 

In its love of bright colors, cheerful abstraction and child-like re-imaginings, Minoliti’s work poses a staunch rejection of everything coded as ideally modern: the primacy of cis-maleness, the hold of compulsive heterosexuality, and the arbitrariness of the rational, the serious and the violent. In opposition, Minoliti’s practice pursues the flexibility and speculation of queerness, softness, humor, cuteness, joy and love.

 

Their subversion of abstraction with winks of friendly gestures of figuration –doggy and kitty faces, anime eyes and other cutesy critters– wields the intention to disarm its modernist origins and to use it instead as a language, capable of rewiring our strongly-held assumptions towards a certain visuality, what we consider to be part of a feminine realm of care, domesticity, tenderness, cuteness and children. In their detaching of these images from essentialism and infantilization, Minoliti seeks to configure a powerful, potential-filled aesthetics of empathy and collaboration centered primarily on its anti-adultism. 

 

Faithful to Minoliti’s expansiveness, the exhibition includes a series of murals which serve as complement and backdrop to paintings, drawings and digital compositions. Pieces from the ‘Queer Deco’ series, in which Minoliti digitally intervenes and populates the idealized spaces of modernist living –those images of pseudo-futuristic comfort– with geometrical entities capable of inhabiting the place as well as transform it, taking it beyond its techno-patriarchal so-called efficiency, acting as perfect disorganizers: merely co-existing, floating shapes oblivious to work, productivity or any form of oppression. Another group of pieces comes from the  ‘GSCF’ series, an acronym for geometrical sci-fi cyborg. These pieces are classic Minoliti in their re-imagination of landscape and nature through the use of fluid, frolicky airbrush strokes in somewhat unnatural color combinations, and further rarefied by the appearance of indeterminate yet active beings like bubbles, shapes, pseudo-flowers, shadows and robots, interacting with one-another. The series of drawings titled ‘Geo Sci Fi’ too exists in this realm, and shows many of those eccentric characters in more bio-technical detail. From the same period, the series ‘Cyborg Mom’ makes reference to a series of paintings created by Minoliti in collaboration with their mother, which then led to a quirky series of digital prints which are equal parts voluptuous compositions and unexpected color palettes. The exhibition also includes a couple of Minoliti’s furries, the human-animal mannequins dressed in the artist’s prints that frequently animate the spaces of their art, able to share the moment of contemplation with human spectators, but perhaps not really needing them, their presence as a speculative autopoiesis of art for art with art.

 

– Gaby Cepeda