Artists and Beta-Local collaborators Felipe Mujica and Johanna Unzueta will present original artworks and documentation of work by Margarita Azurdia, Felipe Mujica, Jorge González, Ana Maria Millan, Javier Tellez and Johanna Unzueta in ISCP’s exhibition galleries. The exhibition will reveal contrasts between Geometric Abstraction, with its idealistic and formalist characteristics, and more personal, exotic and political forms of expression. Works include a video of a flying body crossing the US-Mexico border in a semi-circle trajectory, a ceramic turtle resting over a neo-geo-style cube, and a group of photographs of Minimal-like sculptures and paintings with the artist fashionably posing next to them, among others. This presentation is a prelude “test-drive” or “rehearsal” for an exhibition scheduled for later this year in Santiago, Chile at Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo.
Margarita Azurdia (Antigua, Guatemala, 1931–1998) studied at Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas, Guatemala City and at McGill University of Liberal Arts-College of San Francisco, California. She exhibited her work in Mexico, the United States, France, and Central America. She was also part of a generation of Guatemalan artists who experimented with performance art in the 1970s.
Ana Maria Millán was born in 1975 in Cali, Colombia. She lives and works between Bogotá and Berlin. Millán’s work explores different forms of transmission of information in relation to subcultures, violence and exclusion discourses. Her work has been shown at El Matadero, Madrid; Video Sector, Miami Art Basel; Instituto de Visión, Bogotá; Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Cartagena de Indias, Cartagena; 12th Bienal de Cuenca, Cuenca; SFMoMa, San Francisco; and Creative Time, New York.
Jorge González was born in 1981 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he currently lives and works. González has exhibited at Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Germany; Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Jardín Borda, Cuernavaca, México.
Felipe Mujica is a New York-based artist born in 1974 in Santiago, Chile. In 1997, he co-founded the artist run space Galería Chilena, which operated between 1999 and 2005, first a nomadic and commercial art gallery and later as a collaborative art project, a curatorial “experiment”. He has exhibited his work at Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City; Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City; Galeria Nuno Centeno, Porto; Fundazione Merz, Turin; Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo; Biennial of the Americas, Denver; 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou; and most recently at the 12 Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador.
Javier Tellez is a New York-based artist born in 1969 in Venezuela. His work reflects a sustained interest in bringing peripheral communities and invisible situations to the fore of contemporary art addressing institutional dynamics, disabilities and mental illness as marginalizing conditions. He has exhibited in major institutions worldwide and recently had solo exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Zurich, SMAK, Ghent; San Francisco Art Institute and REDCAT,Los Angeles. His work has been included in exhibitions such as dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, Whitney Biennale, Manifesta, Sydney Biennale and Venice Biennial.
Johanna Unzueta is a New York-based artist born in 1974 in Santiago, Chile. Working primarily with sculpture and installations, her work focuses on the notion of labor. She has exhibited at Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City; Christinger De Mayo, Zürich; David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile; The Queens Museum of Art, New York, and Or Gallery, Vancouver.
