
This February, during Mexico City’s art week, OMR’s primary gallery space in Colonia Roma Norte will display 2 FEET IN 1 BUCKET OF ICE, a solo exhibition by Yann Gerstberger (France, 1983). His second solo exhibition with the gallery, it follows ICE NEWS & FREEWAY FETISHES, presented in OMR in February 2019.
Created in his studio on the Pacific coast of Mexico, these new works encompass Gerstberger’s multi-faceted practice, including paintings and tapestries produced with an original technique conceived by the artist: he glues hand-dyed cotton fibers (originally from mops) on canvas to form colorful surfaces. Inspired by patterns found in Mexican popular culture, art history and nature, the artist blurs the boundaries of abstraction and figuration, traditional techniques and mass-consumption products, suggesting craftsmanship as a possible continuation of the modernist pictorial project.
During the past decade, Yann Gerstberger (Cagnes-sur-Mer, France, 1983) has created a body of work in which uncontinuous, innocent, tropical and primitive motifs constitute a visual vocabulary mixed between the representational and abstract. Rugged and colorful, the tapestries are a sublime amalgamation of the extensive archive of imagery culled by the artist from many sources, including the Internet, in an effort to engage the material world with its imaginary counterpart.
Courtesy OMR.




Gerstberger´s series of textile tapestries depict narratives inspired by patterns found in Mexican popular culture, art history and nature. These works are produced with an original technique conceived by the artist: he glues fibres of cotton (mops, originally) on vinyl to form colourful surfaces, mixed with industrial fabric, preferably patterned or textured that he finds in markets in the city. The cotton fibres are dyed by hand, using a mixture of natural mexican dyes such as cochineal, and industrial ones like Citocol, the most basic dye that can be found in the supermarket. Yann Gerstberger builds through his tapestries/paintings a vernacular vocabulary referencing the Fábulas Pánicas of Jodorowsky, the fantasy of the tropical seen from Europe, postgraffiti and the history of abstraction and its repertoire of ambiguous and mystical shapes.

OMR is a contemporary art gallery in Mexico City, founded by Patricia Ortiz Monasterio and Jaime Riestra in 1983. Over the past four decades, the gallery has fostered and developed the careers of numerous emerging and established artists throughout Latin America and globally; OMR has established itself as a pioneering Mexican contemporary art space, presenting over 400 exhibitions across all media and genres, and participating in art fairs around the world.

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