GROUP EXHIBITION

The exhibit will be open to the public from June 29th to September 6th, 2024. AfterEden is a group show that inquiries about the notion of landscape that remains “afterparadise.” Through a selection of works using painting, photography, sculpture, orsound as an expressive medium, the exhibit proposes an aesthetic and epistemic tourthrough the outlines that landscape has acquired in contemporary art practices. In thecontext of a world devastated by environmental disaster and the destructive forces ofprogress, the notion of landscape that emerges from these works doesn’t seem to referto aesthetic contemplation or spiritual plenitude, but rather to uncertainty and chaos.Even if, on occasions, it can also produce a disturbing beauty.

Some of the pieces in the exhibit present non-idealised landscapes, which address theunderstanding of nature together with the regulation of social life. Others show theconvergence between the dystopia of an idyllic Brazilian landscape and the artist’sautobiographical introspection. In some others, the catastrophic vision of the actions ofmankind on the ecosystems is portrayed through tremulous brush strokes, in a sublimeand abstract code.

Other works in the show offer a snapshot of the desert landscape in northern Mexico,which has been replaced or invaded by an artificial one, made of tires and industrialwaste. Some others highlight the dusty plains and rocky hills of the Chilean desertwhile mapping the extractivist role of corporations and the predation of tourism on thisecosystem. Another piece presents a sonic journey through some locations ofcontemporary Peru, in which the ocean turns central to the cultural, economic, andsocial definition of landscape.

The exhibit also includes a series of works that examine the multiple facets of therelationship between nature and the elements, as well as the equation between matter,context, and the temporalities of objects. And finally, the gallery space welcomesvarious ceramic sculptures of suggestive organic shapes spread around the place as ifthey were a living organism.

About Gabriela Rangel

Gabriela Rangel is an independent curator and writer based in Brooklyn, New York.From 2019 to 2021 she was the artistic director of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericanode Buenos Aires (MALBA). Prior to that she was the visual arts director and chiefcurator at Americas Society from 2004 to 2019. She holds an MA in curatorial studiesfrom the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, an MA in media andcommunications studies from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Caracas, and filmstudies from the International Film School at San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba. She hasworked at the Fundación Cinemateca Nacional and the Museo Alejandro Otero inCaracas and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Rangel has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions on modern andcontemporary art as well as monographic shows of Elsa Gramcko, Erick Meyenberg,Sylvia Gruner, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Marta Minujín, Gordon MattaClark, Gego, ArturoHerrera, José Leonilson, and Xul Solar. She has written for Hyperallergic, LetrasLibres, Revista Ñ, Art in America, Parkett, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art Nexus, editednumerous books, and contributed texts to such publications as Emily Mae Smith(Petzel Gallery, New York); Pedro Reyes: Sociatry (Museum Marta Hertford, Hertford,Germany, 2022); Rosangela Renno (Pinacoteca de SP, 2021); Erick Meyenberg: DMajor Isn’t Blue (Museo Amparo, 2020); Lydia Cabrera: Between the Sum and theParts (Americas Society/Koenig Books, London, 2019); Contesting Modernity:Informalism in Venezuela 1955–1975 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2018); MartaMinujín, Minocodes (Americas Society, 2016); and A Principality of Its Own (AmericasSociety/Harvard University Press, 2006).