One of the best-known creators of Latin American art

Venezuelan artist Alexander Apóstol brings to Mexico his retrospective 'Posture and geometry in the era of tropical autocracy'

The Venezuelan artist Alexander Apóstol, one of the best-known creators of current Latin American art, has brought his traveling retrospective Posture and Geometry in the Era of Tropical Autocracy to Mexico City. It will be open at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) until May 12, 2024.

Eleven videos, photos and conceptual actions, conceived since 2005 to date, make up the exhibition, which has already traveled to the Dos de Mayo Art Center in Madrid, the Proa Foundation in Buenos Aires and the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá. At each location the artist has created site-specific works.

One of the pieces he made for Mexico is the video Le Corbusier and Diego Rivera Visit Each Other 30 Times in which he imagines a meeting between the French architect and the Mexican muralist.

Another of the works that stands out in the MUAC rooms is the photographic series Régimen: Dramatis personae (2017–2018). The Mexican curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, in charge of organizing the retrospective, has selected fifty portraits from that series that explore identity transformation in various contexts.

The Venezuelan artist dedicates a good part of his work to investigating how nationalist and populist political projects influence the identity of the subjects.

According to the curator, the retrospective as a whole “maintains a constant look at the intersection between the aestheticization of politics and the way in which the most diverse artistic practices allow themselves to be absorbed, instrumented and mobilized by different stages of continental politics.”
The work of Alexander Apóstol, in the words of Medina, “oscillates around the dichotomy of visual traditions in Venezuela: on the one hand, the historicist and nativist vision deployed by realist painters – under the protection of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez – which It continues in the tragic and comic staging of the Bolivarian regime of the present. On the other, the utopia of energetic and corporal reinvention of constructivism during the oil boom, between 1960 and 1970.”

Apóstol has lived in Madrid since 2002. He was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, in 1969. He studied Art History at the Central University of Venezuela and is one of the most prominent artists on the Latin American scene. His work has been presented at the biennials of Shanghai, Venice, Gwangju, São Paulo, EVA International, Manifesta, Canarias, Havana, Prague, Cuenca, Istanbul, etc.
His works are found in public and private collections, such as the Tate Modern, in London; the Guggenheim Museum, in New York; the Center Pompidou, in Paris; the Pérez Art Museum and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, in Miami; the Banco de la República Museum, in Bogotá; the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, in Caracas, the Dos de Mayo Art Center Museum and the ARCO Foundation, in Madrid.