Marta Minujín

Marta Minujín (Buenos Aires, 1943) presents her first solo  exhibition in Mexico in more than twenty-five years. To Live in  Art brings together a selection of historical and recent works  that attest to her significant impact on the global art scene.  For over six decades, Minujín has redefined contemporary art  and participated in movements that challenged convention,  establishing her as one of the most important figures in  Argentinian art and a global icon.

On the day of the opening, at 12pm, the gallery presents a live conversation between the artist and the curator Pablo León de la Barra. 

The conversation is the eleventh chapter of the FUTURE DIALOGUES series—and the second chapter in the Mexico City gallery—hosted by kurimanzutto with the support of Aeroméxico.

The title of the exhibition reflects the artist’s profound  desire to imprint every aspect of life with art. A pioneer in  happenings, performance, and interactive art, Minujín has  demonstrated throughout her extensive career that art can  infiltrate every aspect of human existence—from our most  intimate spaces to global politics and markets.

One of the main pieces in the show is El obelisco acostado (The Obelisk Lying Down), presented in Mexico for  the first time. This 1978 work gave rise to the series La caída  de los mitos universales (The Fall of Universal Myths) and was  originally exhibited in the Bienal Latinoamericana de São Paulo  that same year. Lying across the gallery space, a replica of the  obelisk at the Plaza de la República in Buenos Aires invites the  public to walk through it and discover a series of videos by the  artist projected inside. One video shows documentary footage  of the original obelisk in Argentina, while another presents the  supposed relocation of the monument from Buenos Aires to  São Paulo. These videos activate the sculpture as a narrative  and conceptual mechanism—one that questions the origin and  meaning of cultural myths.

The simple gesture of laying down a monument and  making it accessible undermines its symbolic authority. Verticality—and with it, the phallocentrism embedded in many  monuments—has long been a target of Minujín’s work, which  seeks to disarm such structures through the active  participation of the public. Initiated more than four decades  ago, The Fall of Universal Myths series offers a powerful  dismantling of the symbols that uphold official state narratives. Its continued relevance today speaks to the urgent need to  rethink, through horizontality, new forms of representation  and collective experience in our societies.

Surrounding the fallen obelisk is a selection of mattress  works that Minujín has been creating since 2006. The mattress first appeared in her work during the 1960s, while she was  studying in Paris. Initially, she repurposed discarded mattresses  found on the streets near hospitals, painting them with striped  patterns inspired by the fashionable miniskirts of the era— infusing them with a vibrant, provocative energy that echoed  the spirit of the sexual revolution. When asked about her  interest in this material, she replied: “Half of your life takes  place on a mattress. You are born, you die, you make love, you  can get killed on the mattress.” In the more recent series of  mattress works presented here, Minujín constructs  intertwined soft forms that she paints in bold colors,  transmitting a sense of movement, vitality, and joy. These  sculptures are accompanied by drawings that echo their  exuberant forms and palettes, offering a closer look at the  artist’s pictorial practice and the relationship between her  two- and three-dimensional work.

Alongside El Obelisco Acostado, archival materials  offer a deeper look into key moments of Minujín's career. The selection of materials—such as photographs, installation processes, production diagrams, and press clippings—trace the evolution of her large-scale participatory monuments and use of ephemeral materials. Spanning from her early mattress works of the 1960s to iconic projects like El Obelisco de Pan  Dulce (1979), La Torre de Pan de James Joyce (1980), and El Partenón de los Libros (1983/2017), the presentation highlights her fusion of pop aesthetics with public intervention. These materials contextualize the work on view, revealing Minujín's broader artistic and political vision for transforming civic space and cultural memory.

To Live in Art allows us to appreciate different aspects  of the Argentinian artist's work and invites reflection on  Minujín’s role in the consolidation of Latin American art as a  vehicle for the global avant-garde.

–kurimanzutto

Image: Copyright of Archivo Marta Minujín