Pedro Reyes

Pedro Reyes was born in 1972, in Mexico City, where he lives and works. He studied architecture at Universidad Iberoamericana and founded “Torre De Los Vientos”, in Mexico City, where he curated more than forty exhibitions, between 1996 and 2002, and where he began his artistic career.

His works are sculptural and action devices that incite change, proposing solutions for specific social problems. This strategy contemplates the creation of projects that involve group dynamics and objects anchored in techniques of theatre and social psychology, as well as installations that give new functions to objects integrated in social and economic calamities, transforming them into new pacifying utensils. The concreteness value, characteristic of his sculptural pieces, almost always functional, shows influences from ancestral and modernist sculpture.

Reyes has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Art Institute, California, 2008; Bass Museum, Miami, 2008; CCA Kitakyushu, 2009; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2011; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2011; The Power Plant, Toronto, 2014; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2015; Creative Time, New York, 2016 and Museum of Tanguely, Basel, 2020, among others. Some of the most important group exhibitions are: Venice Biennale, 2003; Lyon Biennale, 2009; Gwangiu Biennale, 2012; DOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, 2012; Spirit of Utopia, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2013; Beijing Biennale, 2014; Transformers, MAXXI, Rome, 2015; Who can Translate the World?  21^st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2015 and Second Life, PEANA, Mexico City, 2019. In 2006, Reyes received the US Department of State Medal for the Arts, a Ford Foundation Fellowship and the Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work is represented in various institutions like the 21^st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Fundación Jumex, Mexico City; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; MAXXI, Rome; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

 

SN, November 2020