Lulu presents a solo exhibition of the Hanover-based, Mexican artist Isabel Nuño de Buen.

The work of Isabel Nuño de Buen is nothing if not ambitious, if not in terms of scale, then definitely in scope. Incorporating sculpture, architecture and drawing, what she makes is primarily interested in how the development of human civilization as an organic, multilayered, ongoing process may parallel and reflect the development of the human subject or psyche. As such, it is an essentially fragmented practice, whose center is difficult to locate, and which is characterized by a sense of fluctuating incompletion.

For her exhibition at Lulu, Nuño de Buen concentrates on her Codex works, which were first presented, in part, at the Kunstverein Hanover in 2020. These discrete, multilayered walls works, which bring to mind three-dimensional palimpsests consist of paper maché bases. The bases are overlaid with a variety of materials which includes documents or letters, strips of gauze, hand-made yarn, sutured drawings on transparent paper, as well as flat, plate-like segments of glazed ceramics, the whole tied together like gift or a package with string, strips of drawing and gauze. Stacked and condensed, these codices want to be if not literally, then figuratively unpacked. There is the sense that the codices are conundrums which, if properly unpacked and assembled together like puzzles, would yield up their contents. Their semi-inscrutable promise of meaning becomes a kind of meaning itself. Far from literal or didactic, the work, and its multiple, potential significations, plays with and exists on the threshold of comprehension, much like former civilizations exist on the threshold of our understanding, but ultimately remain just beyond our grasp.

— Lulu