Bare
19.03.21 - 07.04.21
They aren't paintings, she says. They're fragments of paintings by Bosch and Brueghel. Unfinished bits from the past.
We look at the empty backgrounds. Bunched heads without faces, bare bums digging holes. Our present condition reverberates around the works: tableaux of dismembered arms and legs, flailing about in cyberspace.
We discuss titles. Something empty and unknowable. Lagoon. Lapse. As nature clings to the edge of the picture plane, huddled bodies seem to be dismantling the old world: slipping into the delirium of a collective trauma.
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WORKS ON VIEW
INSTALLATION VIEWS
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Melanie Smith was born in England in 1965. She lives and works between Mexico City and London. Her work reflects on the extended field of painting within the history of art and its entanglement with moving image. She is interested in the fragments that do not add up, stories without beginning or end, backstage productions and political farse. Mostly, her work shatters any rational significance of production, as a way of thinking through contingent forms and being.
She has exhibited at numerous institutions including PS1 and MOMA, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate Modern, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Museo Tamayo, and MUCA Campus UNAM, Mexico City; Museo Amparo, Puebla; The Modern, Fort Worth; SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Santa Fe. In 2011 she represented Mexico at the 54th Venice Biennale. A panoramic exhibition of her work was shown at Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, in 2014, travelling to the CAC, Vilnius and the Museum Boijmans, Rotterdam. In 2018 she was included in the Liverpool Biennial. Melanie Smith: Farce and Artifice was presented at MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in 2018, and travels to MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, Mexico City, and Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico, 2019. http://melaniesmith.site