Anuar Maauad: WE ARE BODIES (The Archaeology Files)

Mexican artist Anuar Maauad has built a vast archive of over 7,000 sculptural self-portraits created by participants in workshops he’s led over the past thirteen years. Seeking to share insights into the human body and three-dimensional self-image, Maauad’s sculptures in WE ARE BODIES (The Archaeology Files) feature a selection of expressive, handmade clay self-images replicated at large-scale using 3D-printing. Many of the works in this exhibition have origins in the Denver community, stemming from figures made by locals in a workshop with the artist at Black Cube’s Headquarters in March of 2022.

Maauad’s conceptual portraits consist of basic forms like stacked spheres, pinched shapes, or rolled tubes, possessing characteristics that are at once lighthearted and deeply philosophical. By approaching a process similar to automatic drawing, Maauad’s workshops use the preexisting skills and imagination of participants to unlock unconscious thoughts about their bodies. Uniquely, several of the figures made in the Denver workshop were fragments of bodies, bodies without heads, missing or exaggerated body parts.

Many of the artist’s historical influences derive from ancient sculptures like the enigmatic Venus of Willendorf carved some 30,000 years ago, or ceramic and stone phallic figurines seen across ancient cultures worldwide. This series touches on the seemingly universal aspect of self-representation and how this unrestrained observation reveals something elementally human that connects us to our ancestors. The concept’s origin remains buried and twisted, as each end result is both an original and an original copy. Thus, the final sculptures stand as large interpretations of the original instruction reworked into a more complex state.

Together, the exhibition explores the collective unconscious mind of humans, depicting a rich range of reflections on the relationship to our bodies, broader trends of self-representation, and the dissolution of the real as seen through concepts of replication, ownership, and participation. Ultimately, WE ARE BODIES (The Archaeology Files) examines sculpture’s relation to social experience through an interplay between action and reaction.

—Cortney Lane Stell, curator

WE ARE BODIES (The Archaeology Files) is on view at Black Cube’s Headquarters in Colorado through February 10, 2023 during public hours. Schedule a visit here.