VASOS COMUNICANTES

Galería de Arte Mexicano invites you to the group exhibition Vasos Comunicantes, curated by Enrique Giner de los Ríos.

In 1938, Diego Rivera illustrated the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, co-signed with André Breton and Leon Trotsky, with an engraving. The title of the work — Los vasos comunicantes (The Communicating Vessels) — made direct reference to Breton’s 1932 book of the same name, where the flows between dream and wakefulness, art and politics, were compared to the physical principles governing the connection between liquids. In the engraving, Rivera translated these exchanges into a visual machine composed of bodies, symbols, and ideas in constant motion. The image would reappear two years later in the International Exhibition of Surrealism, organized by Breton, Wolfgang Paalen, and César Moro at the Galería de Arte Mexicano.

Taking this piece as a starting point, GAM, together with Enrique Giner de los Ríos, presents the group exhibition Vasos comunicantes. The show brings together pieces from the gallery’s own archive alongside works by contemporary artists invited to engage with the multiple layers of meaning the image activates — from Breton’s notions of the irrational, the dream, and the unconscious, to the political and social context that gave rise to the manifesto and its reverberations in Mexico and beyond. The exhibition also addresses the physical phenomenon that gives it its name — connected vessels that allow liquid to flow from one to another — as well as the formal power of the engraving itself, which provokes new visual readings, at times diverging from Rivera’s style, suggesting other voices, times, and sensibilities.

Artists:

Asma, Alicia Ayanegui, Diego Berruecos, Stefan Brüggemann, Miguel Calderón, Christian Camacho, Pia Camil, Antoine Catala, Alexis de Chaunac, José Clemente Orozco, Paloma Contreras, Sebastián Córdova, Dexter Dalwood, Aníbal Delgado, Carolina Fusilier, Santiago Garcés, Gunther Gerzso, Cecilia Granara, Manuela de Laborde, Joy Laville, Julián Madero, Carlos Matos, Ricardo Martínez, Carlos Mérida, Theo Michael, Victoria Núñez, Mariana Paniagua, Francesco Pedraglio, Tania Pérez Córdova, Abel Quezada Rueda, Pablo Rasgado, Pedro Reyes, Diego Rivera, Rafael Rodríguez, Julia Rometti, Ramón Saturnino, Federico Schott, Pablo Soler Frost, Rufino Tamayo, Francisco Toledo, Francisco Ugarte, Rafael Uriegas, Yvonne Venegas, Lucía Vidales, Andrea Villalón, Marek Wolfryd, Diego Zelaya y Nahum Zenil.

— GAM