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LA TALLERA: SCAFFOLDING PROJECT FOR PUBLIC ART

21 Marzo de 2020 - 14 Febrero de 2021

Espacio de exhibición: Centro de documentación

Curaduría: Mónica Montes y Silverio Orduña

During his practice, David Alfaro Siqueiros (Mexico City, 1896 — Morelos, 1974) deployed a series of actions in order to reflect about the nature of public art. Through the construction of La Tallera in 1965, Siqueiros and his collaborators created one of the modernist projects of most significance in Mexico, which, located in Cuernavaca, fostered the experimentation with new materials, collective work within a vast diversity of disciplines, and the development of a pedagogical proposal regarding muralist painting, as well as its effects in the political and social realms.

From 1965 to 1974, La Tallera functioned as a space in constant movement and transformation. At first, its edification was planned to produce a mural that was to be painted in the Convention Center at the Hotel Casino de la Selva; nevertheless, due to the physical and aesthetic magnitude of the project, the work took a new course of action and was completed in what today is called Siqueiros Polyforum: the completed integration between painting, sculpture and architecture, a goal which the muralist sought since his first pictorial experiments.

Conceived with an important amount of unprecedented material, made up of documents, photographic images and videos, this exhibition shapes a narrative that looks over the production stages of La Tallera and its vow to support art that was committed to Siqueiros’ critical views. Also, the show allows the viewer to get close to the space’s quotidian past, where artists, both women and men, blacksmiths, bricklayers, photographers, scientists and laborers simultaneously shared a work and learning space.


Mónica Montes y Silverio Orduña

-Curators-