August 23–October 4, 2025
Marta Minujín’s first solo show in Mexico is a succinct and forceful affair. Only two bodies of work are shown; all the pieces are reproductions, remakes, or documentation. With this exhibition, kurimanzutto, who started representing the 82-year-old Argentinian artist last year, positions her as the “global artist” she was always destined to be. A key figure in the development of performance, media, and conceptual art in her home country, Minujín’s international impact has not always been recognized. She burned her own work in a happening in Paris titled La Destrucción in 1963, seven years before Baldessari did it. She made art with Andy Warhol and Allan Kaprow, wreaked havoc on Argentinian national TV, and cut through miles of bureaucratic red tape in order to bring her ephemeral monuments to real audiences in many countries.
The central piece in this exhibition is the monumental El obelisco acostado (Obelisk Lying Down, 1978), a smaller reproduction of the Buenos Aires Obelisk duplicate that Minujín presented at the Bienal Latinoamericana de São Paulo in 1978. It’s a wonderfully wacky intervention: the phallic symbol of state authoritarianism—then in the hands of Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship and its vicious Dirty War—has been toppled, its power questioned. The white prism bisects the gallery horizontally, accompanied by ephemera documenting its original version. Among these materials is El obelisco navegando en el espacio sideral (The Obelisk Navigating Sidereal Space, 1979–81), a fanciful painting of the monument speeding through galaxies like a spaceship, with dancers and nudists on board. In an Instagram post, Minujín claimed the painting predates the São Paulo sculpture.
That piece originated a decades-long series, “The Fall of Universal Myths.” It includes another reproduction of the obelisk, this one made out of panettone in Buenos Aires, El obelisco de pan dulce (The Pastry Obelisk, 1979); a seventeen-meter-tall Carlos Gardel effigy immolated at the Medellín Art Biennial in 1981; and a Parthenon constructed out of books banned under the dictatorship and installed as democracy was reestablished in Argentina in 1983, remade for Documenta 14 in 2017 (the latter version brought Minujín to wider international prominence and revitalized interest in her past works). We mourn that the effigy of Margaret Thatcher made out of cans of corned beef and cotton—as fuel for burning—could not be brought to fruition in 1982, the year of the Malvinas War. Each of these works involved a lighthearted break with reality: the audience was allowed to take the books and bread, or inhale the smoke of burning myth. That part is missing from this show, and I mourn for that, too. Minujín’s work is simply more effective when it is live.
An old TV positioned at the obelisk’s end isn’t working. Whether or not life is art, art is under constant assault by life and its gadgets. The screen is quickly fixed, allowing me to watch grainy footage of the Argentinian capital. Some of it is lovely: young and old explain why Minujín’s obelisk is great (“the foreigners love it”) and why it being on its side would be fun (“we should try painting it different colors too”). There’s also a classic iteration of Minujín’s signature look—blonde bob, bangs, aviator glasses, trendy clothes—as she poses by the collapsed monument at the Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo. The video ends with a close-up of a smiling Minujín proclaiming, with characteristic panache: “The Obelisk Lying Down artwork is the maximum geniality of the universe, bye!”
The rest of the works are remakes of her popular Fluor-colored mattress sculptures, which she started in Paris in the sixties. My favorite, Colchón (Eróticos en technicolor) (Mattress [Erotics in technicolor], 1964), housed at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, struggles against gravity: it’s haphazardly suspended on two springs with a gaping mouth on its side, and limp limbs hanging under it—all in a striped print, gaudy and dirty. The more recent versions exhibited in this gallery, created between 2008 and ’22, lack that lively scrappiness. They’re a little too clean, stiff, and new.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best ones are the oldest ones. Trepando al infinito (Climbing onto Infinity, 2008) and All the lovely people (2010) both allude to the sexiness of group activities in bed. The first piles human-sized pillows onto the wall, a heap of overlapping arms, legs, and undulant shapes rendered in the loudest of color schemes. The latter is more pared back—as much as Minujín’s trademark excess allows—with layered canvases supporting a smaller group of figures. Among them, a pillow-threesome projects from the wall, framed by squiggly neon tubing.
Minujín’s politics are articulated in a register that is whimsical, extravagant, and occasionally absurd. Yet even when they bewilder their audience, her gestures emerge in response to moments of social disorder and political upheaval—and, at times, developments in her personal life. When she staged a “marriage” to Art at The Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires on her 70th birthday, in 2013, she arrived by horse-drawn carriage wearing a white dress and sunglasses. The work was not included in this serious gallery show, yet a touch of that playfulness, even volatility, would have gone a long way. Luckily, as I walk out, the sound of a crowd singing “Las Mañanitas” spills into the gallery from the back door. Life finds a way.
