This exhibition brings together more than sixty artists who, during the 1980s, explored Mexico through a penetrating gaze on the pre-Hispanic past, the territory, popular culture, and the country’s transition toward globalization. Created between 1981 —the year the Museo Tamayo opened— and 1991—the year of Rufino Tamayo’s death and the total solar eclipse— these works redefined our conception of the national. In an era marked by socioeconomic crisis, political instability, and the devastating 1985 earthquake, the artists participating in this exhibition anticipated ways of entering and exiting the contemporary through the fissures of history.

‍Before the Eclipse. Archaeologies of Art in Mexico focuses on Mexican and foreign artists who lived in Mexico City during this period and were interested in archaeology, ecology, and spirituality. Through travel narratives, site-specific interventions, sculptures, paintings, assemblages, videos, and manipulated images, their works reveal a constant exploration of Mexico’s cultural landscape.

Some of these works are being presented in Mexico for the first time and invite a reinterpretation in relation to current contexts, while others challenge historical narratives from intimate, physical, or political perspectives. Rather than merely illustrating a period, the exhibition seeks to unfold a field of resonances between temporalities, formats, and artistic gestures.

To mark the 45th anniversary of the Museo Tamayo, the exhibition returns to the cultural context of the museum’s early years (1981–1991) and revisits the thought of Rufino Tamayo, who proposed a dialogue between the vernacular and the universal, the ancestral and the modern. Using archaeological methodology as a metaphor, the exhibition explores the relationship between material culture, mythology, and the social constructs underlying the historical layers of that period.

‍Artists: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Adolfo Patiño, Adolfo Riestra, Andrea Ferreyra, Ángela Gurría, Antonio Turok, Armando Cristeto, Beatriz Ezban, Bob Schalkwijk, Boris Viskin, Carla Rippey, Carlos Aguirre, Carlos Arias, Christa Cowrie, Cisco Jiménez, Claudia Fernández, Damián Ortega, Diego Toledo, Eduardo Abaroa, Enrique Cantú, Enrique Cava, Estela Hussong, Eugenia Vargas, Felipe Ehrenberg, Francis Alÿs, Francisco "Taka" Fernández, Gabriela Ortiz Torres, Gerardo Suter, Gerda Warnholtz, Germán Venegas, Gregorio Rocha, Guillermo Santamarina en colaboración con Iván Edeza, Helen Escobedo, Javier Álvarez, James H.D. Brown, Jan Hendrix, Jimmie Durham, José Bedia, José María Velasco, Juan Francisco Elso, Juan José Gurrola, Laureana Toledo, Lourdes Grobet, Magali Lara, Manuel Rocha, Marcos Kurtycz, Maria Thereza Alves, Mariana Yampolsky, Mario Rangel Faz, Mauricio Maillé, Mauricio Rocha, Melanie Smith, Mónica Castillo, Néstor Quiñones, Roberto Turnbull, Rogelio Cuellar, Rosario García Crespo, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Rufino Tamayo, Sarah Minter, Silvia Gruner, Thomas Glassford, Ulf Rollof, Yolanda Andrade, Yolanda Gutiérrez, 19 Concreto and Colección filatélica Jorge Sánchez.

Curated by: Maco Sánchez Blanco and Andrea Torreblanca

OMR is pleased to announce Zonas de Colaboración, Rubén Ortiz Torres' solo exhibition in New York at Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, curated by Betti-Sue Hertz.The exhibition remains open to the public until March 16, 2025. This exhibition examines the deconstruction of styles, the displacement of identity paradigms, and the creation of new forms of political aesthetics within his artistic practice. Through a selection of photography, ceramics, textiles, painting, animation, and printmaking, Ortiz Torres collaborates with workshops in Los Angeles and Guadalajara to craft a visual narrative that intertwines the historical with the contemporary.

Among the featured works, murals depict the chaotic dynamics of global conflicts, and diacritic records of his social circle are painted on ceramic plates. Additionally, palladium prints of Machu Picchu establish a link between the Peruvian diaspora in Los Angeles and the memory of ancestral spaces.

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Customatism is the first retrospective exhibition of Rubén Ortiz Torres (1964), a Mexican artist based in California and a key figure in contemporary art since the mid-1980s. Ortiz Torres presents a critical, cosmopolitan, technically inventive and intellectually comical visual practice, through an oeuvre that explores the cultural paradoxes of the global world that offers an informed critique of avant-garde art traditions.