MANUEL ÁLVAREZ BRAVO  (Mexico City, Mexico, 1902 - Mexico City, Mexico, 2002)

Manuel Álvarez Bravo, one of the founders of modern photography, is considered the greatest representative of 20th century Latin American photography. His work extends from the late 1920s to the 1990s. He was born in the city center of the Mexican capital on February 4th, 1902. At age 12, to help with the family economy after the passing of his father, he interrupted his education and started working in a textile factory and eventually, at the General Treasury of the Nation. His grandfather, a painter, and his father, a teacher, were photography enthusiasts. This early discovery of the possibilities of the camera drove Álvarez Bravo to explore every photographic procedure and graphic technique in a self-taught manner.

He approached pictorialism initially, influenced by his studies in painting at the Academia de San Carlos. Later, he became interested in modern aesthetics, specifically in cubism and the possibilities of abstraction. In 1930, Tina Modotti was deported from Mexico, leaving her position at the Mexican Folkways magazine to Álvarez Bravo. This is how he got his start in documentary photography, by working for the muralist painters Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Álvarez Bravo is an emblematic figure in the period following the Mexican Revolution, known as the Mexican Renaissance. This was a period whose artistic richness was due to the happy — though not always serene—, coexistence of an eagerness for modernization and a search for an identity, in which archeology, history, and ethnology played a relevant role. Álvarez Bravo incarnates both tendencies in the field of the visual arts.

DIEGO PÉREZ   (México City, Mexico, 1975)

Diego Pérez’s multidisciplinary practice continuously plays with the idea of the border, be they the limits that divide art from other sorts of objects, those that divide art from the wider public, or those that separate contemplation from experimentation. The artist articulates a sculptural imagination in which every material is an endless source of forms whose relationships do not end in the work, but extend to the environment and the viewer.

Beginning his career in the field of photography, Pérez has oriented his work towards the public life of objects, fomenting, not without a degree of humor and an affinity for fantasy, an inquiry about social relationships that give works meaning. It is in everyday life where a chair becomes a shelf, or where a box transforms into a plant pot; the art- life border is constituted and dissolved in the conjunction of public space, work and spectator.

For Pérez, it is important to let imagination and daydreaming flow, because that is where the contact between apparently separate fields is produced between artist and artisan, connoisseur, casual observer and so on.

He currently lives and works in Mexico City.

KARINA AGUILERA SKVIRSKY   (RhodeIsland,USA,1967)

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multidisciplinary Ecuadorian and Jewish-American artist based in New York. Through video, performance, and photography, her practice navigates broader questions of place, identity, and nationhood. Her main subjects of interest are abstraction, politics, humor, feminism, and history. With her work, she has explored social topics such as the African diaspora in both the North and the South of the hemisphere, the complexities of indigeneity, and the legacies of colonialism. Aguilera Skvirsky’s work has been exhibited internationally in group and solo shows in renowned galleries and museums, highlighting, among them: Museo de la Ciudad, Cuenca, Ecuador (2021), Photoville, The Clemente, NY, USA (2021), Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2019), Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, Mexico (2018), The Deutsche Bank, NY, USA (2018), Ponce + Robles Gallery, Madrid, Spain (2017), The Institute of Contemporary Art, PA, USA (2016), Instituto Cervantes, Rome, Italy (2013), The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ, USA (2013), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT, USA (2007), El Museo del Barrio, NY, USA (2006), and Sara Meltzer Gallery, NY, USA (2006).

Throughout her career, she has been recognized with various grants from such as Anonymous Was A Woman (2019), The National Association of Latino Arts Culture (2018), Jerome Foundation Fellowship (2015), Fulbright Scholar Program (2015), Puffin Foundation, Teaneck, NJ, USA (2006), among others.

She currently lives and works between New York and Ecuador.