anonymous gallery is pleased to announce El Camino, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Hugo Montoya, and Montoya’s first solo exhibition in Mexico City - a city where he spent a number of years working and living. Montoya, like his pieces, are nomadic. They traverse time, space, and cultures - carrying the weight of stereotypes and histories, only to shatter them into questions. Montoya's work provides little in answers; instead, he conjures fictions and absurdities that leave us suspended in the act of wonder.
El Camino opens February 5th, with a public opening February 7, 6-9 pm. C. Gobernador Ignacio Esteva 44, San Miguel Chapultepec I Secc, Miguel Hidalgo, 11850 Ciudad de México, CDMX, Mexico | Floor 3. Contact hola@anonymousgallery.com for more information
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Hugo Montoya (b. 1975, Gainesville, Florida) lives and works between Catskills, New York and Mexico City. Recent solo exhibitions include anonymous gallery (New York, NY); Et al (San Francisco, CA): Tiro al Blanco (Guadalajara): Gondola Wish/Lulu (online): Rinomina (Paris); Big Pictures LA (Los Angeles); Emerson Dorsch (Miami); Guccivuitton (Miami); David Castillo Gallery (Miami)
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According to Nahua mythology and following the promise of Huitzilopochtli, the Mexica walked for two hundred and sixty years from Aztlan until they found the divine sign written in the prophecies, an eagle devouring a snake on a cactus. Guided only by the idea of the promised land, entire generations sacrificed themselves until they found the symbol that would allow them to found a city on a lake. This mystical and unattainable spirit is nourished by thousands of stories that are hidden and synthesized under the national myth. During modernity and with the founding of the nation-state, perhaps this symbol becomes the first “ready-made” of the Anahuac Valley, a figurative and sculptural symbol that evokes the history of the mystical sacrifice of an entire people.
Five hundred years later it seems that the determinism behind algorithms standardizes our reality through technological posthumanist gods, via apps on our phones, to chart logical paths. Sometimes it feels as if every decision we make is pre-defined and controlled by forces beyond our own reason. The Anglo-Saxon puritanism that controls the West based on the binary thinking of yes/no // zero/one reduces the poetic possibilities of reality. There is a permanent tension between these forces, between logic and chance, between the previously determined and free will, the surprise that is all around us but few know how to show it.
In this exhibition Hugo Montoya makes a display of symbols that play with these tensions, with history and the complex and contradictory sensibilities that still inhabit us. Montoya proposes doors to new dimensions through play, disciplined by the sensibility of a nomad who is always in search of unique treasures. There is an almost surgical delicacy in the selection of paintings found and combined with elements full of stories from different places, worked with an alchemy typical of someone who builds a new imagination with the reality that already exists, where ambiguity is an invitation to dream of what lies behind what our eyes see, promises of divine horizons in distant lands.
Each decision is a path that chooses a possibility. There is a behavior that decides one thing over the other, a discrimination that is nourished by intuition, context and chance. Each material contains a history, a spiritual charge, each decision of the artist a new path. This exhibition is a sum of these decisions and possibilities that nourish each other to exist in this time and space.
- Alberto Rodríguez
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Hugo Montoya .