🌎 ESPAÑOL // ENGLISH
Mathias Goeritz + Formas / Soluciones / Temas (2015)
Curated by Daniel Garza Usabiaga
Curatorial Assistant: Paulina Ascencio
INTRODUCTION
As part of its collection, the Instituto Cultural Cabañas houses more than 200 works by Mathias Goeritz. The artist preserved these works until the moment of his death. The collection includes drawings, paintings, gouaches, sculptures, collages, assemblages, and reliefs. Together, these works account for the entirety of Goeritz’s artistic production. They range from examples created before his arrival in Mexico, by way of Guadalajara, to his latest works. This exhibition initially seeks to display the greatest possible number of pieces from this collection in order to give visibility to this remarkable part of the institution’s holdings.
As is well known, the year 2015 marked the centenary of Mathias Goeritz’s birth. This commemoration prompted the organization of numerous events and projects aimed at reflecting on the legacy of this important artist. This exhibition is part of those initiatives. Rather than focusing on biography or on the formulation of a historiographic argument, this project directs attention toward his work. Drawing from the collection housed by the Instituto Cultural Cabañas, this museographic essay attempts to think through Goeritz’s production plastically—investigating its forms, solutions, and themes. This type of analysis, as is known, does not exclude the historical examination surrounding the figure of the creator.
Goeritz arrived in Mexico in 1949 and settled in the city of Guadalajara, where he lived for a little over three years. From the moment he arrived in the country, he played a crucial role in introducing non-objective forms into the realm of art, experimenting with new monumental formats, and developing a repertoire of forms that he reproduced across different media and supports—constituting a significant precedent for multidisciplinary practice. The novelty and originality of his solutions were largely determined by the way he maintained a dialogue with international avant-garde practices while simultaneously updating local artistic traditions, techniques, and legacies. Although Goeritz received commissions from multiple and diverse actors—from the State to the Church—and created works in sites as disparate as luxury hotels and industrial buildings, certain themes consistently reappeared throughout his production: eroticism, the ominous, and, undoubtedly the theme to which he devoted the most ink and words, spirituality. These are themes that may be said to operate in an almost symbolic manner.
FORMS
GEOMETRY / REPERTOIRE OF FORMS AND MULTIPLICITY OF MEDIA / SCALE
One of the characteristic traits of Goeritz’s production upon arriving in Mexico was the adoption of simplified and elemental forms, among which geometric bodies stand out. In doing so, he became the first artist to develop a radically non-figurative/non-objective language in Mexico. In the Visual Education course he taught at the School of Architecture of the Universidad de Guadalajara, he explored—together with his students—the use of these forms to investigate fundamental problems concerning image production. Like certain initiatives of the European avant-gardes (such as the Bauhaus), Goeritz’s work demonstrated the unlimited potential contained within the apparently limited language of geometric abstraction. As occurred in the Bauhaus, the German artist established in Mexico understood that this type of language or representation was the most coherent with the technical-constructive proposal of the new modern architecture that, at that moment, was experiencing a major boom throughout the country. Like several teachers and students of the German school, Goeritz considered the presence of color within these forms in order to endow them with a particular quality.In addition to simplified or geometric forms, Goeritz developed throughout his career a repertoire of images that he circulated across numerous and varied media and supports. An image—such as one of the crucifixes from the Savior of Auschwitz series (initiated in 1950)—could appear at different scales as a three-dimensional object, on paper as a silkscreen or gouache, in a tapestry, or as part of the ornamentation of a religious space. This variety of supports and techniques reveals aspects of Goeritz’s creative process, in which an image arising under certain circumstances was susceptible to multiple configurations. This multiplicity also reveals a fundamental aspect of the artist’s production process: he delegated the realization of his works to different specialists (primarily skilled laborers such as artisans). Goeritz developed the projects and produced the image proposals; others executed them.
Years after completing the construction of his Museo Experimental El Eco (1952–53), Goeritz declared that the project had opened the door to an investigation into the subject of scale and that he had designed the building as an enormous sculpture. From that date onward, he embarked on a constant exploration of monumentality as an affective quality: the impression produced by certain forms existing beyond human scale. His proposal—developed for the first time together with Luis Barragán through the Torres de Satélite in 1957–58—was that of monumental urban sculpture as a new alternative for public art that would gradually displace muralism with regard to State commissions. By presenting elemental forms and geometric volumes, Goeritz came to refer to his work as “primary form sculpture,” seeking to relate his proposal for monumental urban sculpture to the postwar practice of Minimalism.
SOLUTIONS
ARCHAISM – REGIONALISM / INTERNATIONAL AVANT-GARDES
Before arriving in Mexico, Mathias Goeritz lived in Spain (1945–49), where he was involved with the group of artists known as the School of Altamira. During that period, the artist developed a style inspired by archaic art—such as cave paintings. Archaic art represented an alternative to academic art and, for that reason, proved suitable for adoption by various avant-garde figures. Goeritz maintained this style during the first years he lived and worked in Mexico. Evidence of this includes the sculpture The Animal of Pedregal (1951) and the series of works related to the figure of the Wounded Animal. Gradually, Goeritz incorporated regional artistic techniques, references, and forms into his production. For example, he created monochromatic works that updated techniques associated with the colonial past or Indigenous cultural forms, such as the Huichol Ojos de Dios.
The monochrome—resolved by Goeritz using gold leaf or ropes and cords—enjoyed a certain vitality within both his production and his theoretical reflections, as well as within the international postwar context. Although anchored in a local context, the artist’s work maintained a dialogue with international art, primarily with the European neo-avant-gardes. While he professed admiration for Dada from the moment he arrived in Mexico, he never ceased reflecting on the work of his contemporaries around the world: the monochrome associated with Yves Klein, the perforations of Lucio Fontana, the accumulations of the Nouveaux Réalistes, and the perceptual use of reflective materials such as aluminum, as seen among members of the ZERO group. Through his classes, writings, editorial work, and curatorial projects, Goeritz played a crucial role in disseminating international avant-garde art in Mexico. Evidence of this was his organization of the first International Concrete Poetry Exhibition in 1966.
THEMES
Some of the themes present in Goeritz’s work are eroticism and the ominous. The latter, identifiable with an (German) Expressionist sensibility, reflected on the events of the era—primarily the conditions of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the experience of exile. The Museo Experimental El Eco (1952–53) included a program that sought to transmit this unsettling quality. Evidence of this was the sculpture Goeritz designed for the courtyard: The Serpent (1953). The artist described it as a “disturbing form” intended to encompass the “anguish of man in the universe.”
Nevertheless, the theme that most occupied Goeritz’s production and discourse was spirituality—largely as a response and antidote to the atrocities of the Second World War and the collapse it represented in humanistic terms. Following such a historical catastrophe, art, from his perspective, needed a new restorative program grounded in spirituality. On one hand, Goeritz created artistic works of a religious and liturgical nature, ranging from small-format crucifixes to abstract stained-glass windows for various temples and synagogues. Within this religious production, the use of gold leaf stands out. More than for its value, the artist employed this material because of its luminous qualities, thereby representing spirituality through light. On the other hand, rather than referring to a particular faith, Goeritz presented a sense of spirituality that traversed and united various religions. An example demonstrating this perspective is the Jerusalem Labyrinth (1973–1980). Located in Israel, this project envisions a space capable of accommodating different faiths.