Guadalajara (Mexico), June 24. The marginal, the everyday and the ugly are the themes of the exhibition “Intimate Anatomy”, a retrospective of the work of the Mexican visual artist Martha Pacheco (1957-2021) which opened this Saturday in Guadalajara (western Mexico) with some pieces. that are displayed for the first time.
Curator María Fernanda Matos Moctezuma explained to EFE that the 250 pieces that make up the exhibition navigate madness, death, everyday life, street figures embodied in drawings and paintings as well as works of sculpture and photography that are complemented by part of a personal archive of the Guadalajara-born artist.
He added that the retrospective, in honor of the work of Pacheco, who died in 2021, takes a tour of the first drawings that marked the subject of his work: death and madness, to his most recent image-based work.
“He has that first phase and then we move to the part where he has another perspective using the camera as a means of recreating the images in his studio where he’s going to confront the subject of his first sketches but really overtly and in which he’s making a series about prison inmates and psychiatric hospitals.”
There are also pictures of the stage from which he gained access to the morgue and another picture with which he dedicated himself to street characters: homeless people, windshield wipers, dogs and corner vendors, the curator said.
“You get into this plastic context in which there is a great deal of closeness to reality. What you work with is photographic realism, and it’s part of photography to recreate those characters, that everyday life of something we don’t want to see and it’s what we don’t want to see,” said Matos Moctezuma.
The selection of pieces is the product of careful research conducted by the curator and the artist’s family at Pacheco’s studio and home.
A constant in Pacheco’s work is that he used to include self-portraits in some pieces as if he were an inmate of a mental health institution or a morgue.
“It is a meeting of pieces for those who did not know her and who encounter her work for the first time, they can have a picture of her identity and what is the importance of her presence in the plastic arts of the country,” she said. I finish.
Pacheco has led some artist groups such as the group called “Forensics”. His work has been part of dozens of group exhibitions, as well as solo shows in Mexico, the United States, and France.
The exhibition will run until October 7.
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