source: artinamericamagazine

Works by Mexico City-based artist Abraham Cruzvillegas behave like magnetic open systems. This year, as part of dOCUMENTA 13, the artist developed a public project involving a game of pick-up sticks, with which he devised a series of activities. Based on its chance system, Cruzvillegas recruited people, objects, and his own body to form social sculptures (picnics, walks, or games in the street), which passersby were asked to capture on their mobile phones.

Best known for his “Autoconstrucción” series, Cruzvillegas often lends use-value to the castoff by calling attention to reclaimed or neglected materials. His 2009 film of the same title documented impromptu architecture in his native Ajusco, Mexico, picturing scores of improbable homes made of detritus recycled to suit residents’ needs. The film, whose title translates to “self-building,” describes the assembly of bricolage structures as a community’s means of identity formation.

Self-destruction is a corresponding operation in “Autodestrucción 1,” the artist’s first exhibition at Regen Projects, Los Angeles [through Dec. 22]. A short story written by Cruzvillegas about his musician uncle Miguel Prado frames the exhibition. Prado was a self-styled Pachuco who traveled from Mexico to San Francisco and Paris as a trumpeter during the Zoot Suit and Zazou heydays of the 1930s. Told from the point of view of Prado’s instrument, the story provides imagery and stylistic grounding for Cruzvillegas’s 12 sculptures: serpentine structures in rebar that support rhythmically hung strips of gaudy fabric and metal chains, all interspersed with feathers and dried meat.

In these latest works, Cruzvillegas allegorically traverses styles of sub-cultural music, fashion and abstract painting. 16 faint charcoal wall drawings of uneasy lines in contained, maze-like compositions underly the artist’s contorted armatures, looking like codified Ab-Ex paintstrokes. The two series, consider skeptically line and contour as expressions of interior lives while alluding to Ab-Ex’s development into a sweeping International style.
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source: waaaatwelovead

亚伯拉罕·克鲁兹威力戈斯 （Abraham Cruzvillegas）个展“Autodestrucción”近日在洛杉矶Regen Projects开幕。亚伯拉罕·克鲁兹威力戈斯（Abraham Cruzvillegas）的艺术实践处理了历史以及对涉及到了经济、社会、政治和历史条件的自我的构建。他采用了不同的方式去打造开放式的创作和接受策略，赋予了物品一种新的生命和环境，产生了意义和阐释方面的变化，同时又证实了概念和关系可以如何被不断地颠倒和转换。他的艺术实践检验了信息构建或是改造历史的方式，阐释了理念通常是许多人、地点和时代的对话的合并。即兴创作与组合是其艺术实践的核心，它们与生存经济、劳动经济及现成物品连接在一起并且受到了后者的影响。这场展览以雕塑作品为主，它们以Parisian Zazou和Californian Zoot Suiters的图像及服饰为基础，装饰有各种现成和构造出来的物品。亚伯拉罕·克鲁兹威力戈斯（Abraham Cruzvillegas）利用了来自阻特装（Zoot Suit）、Zazou及Pachuco运动的文化与音乐中的原材料和灵感，这些非正统的表达模式共享了一种反抗的文化，在其中，时尚和身份通过风格、服装与意识形态创造并且构建了一个临时的自我概念。服装是表达反抗、挑战一致性的方式之一。社会里的不平等和反叛被服装标记了出来，而一旦这些意识形态失败了，这种风格也会随着主角的改变而消逝，回归到其它的现实状态之中。
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source: newsle

Abraham Cruzvillegas (born 1968, Mexico City) is a Mexican conceptual artist. He is known for his work with found objects. He studied Philosophy and Art at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He later became a professor and went on to teach Art History and Theory at UNAM. As a sculptor and writer, Cruzvillegas began as a central participant in a new wave of conceptual art in Mexico City during the late 1980s and 90s, studying under Gabriel Orozco from 1987 to 1991. Along with Orozco, Damian Ortega, Dr Lakra, and Minerva Cuevas, Cruzvillegas was considered part of a new movement in Latin American art (which has been compared to the YBA boom in Britain in the 1980s). His work is held in the collections of Tate Modern, London and MoMA, New York. Together with other artists, he participated in the artist-run space “Temistocles 44″ in the 1990s. Cruzvillegas has shown his work in single and group exhibitions in a number of galleries across Europe, South America and the United States. In 1994, his work was shown in the Fifth Havana Biennial; in 2002 in the XXV São Paulo Biennial; in 2003 in the Fiftieth Venice Biennale; in 2005 in the 1st Torino Triennale; in 2008 in the Bienal de Cali, in Colombia; in the Tenth Havana Biennial, and the Seventh Bienal do Mercosul in Portoalegre. His work has been shown at the New Museum, New York and at Tate Modern in London. Cruzvillegas participated in ROUNDTABLE: The 9th Gwangju Biennale, which takes place 7 September – 11 November 2012 in Gwangju, Korea. In August 2012, it was announced that Cruzvillegas had won the Fifth Annual Yanghyun Prize He is also the co-author of two books in collaboration with the Mexican artist Dr Lakra.
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source:

Abraham Cruzvillegas indaga a própria constituição de si mesmo em relação a sua família e a sua sociedade. Seu projeto Autoconstrucción toma como metáfora a dinâmica das construções edilícias precárias que crescem de forma orgânica e improvisada, sem orçamento, e que marcaram a experiência de vida e familiar do artista. Em Tratado de Libre Comer (2009), Cruzvillegas recobre completamente de tinta vermelha centenas de documentos que são a evidência de seu fazer, postulando interrogações sobre o processo de cancelamento da imagem – de suas qualidades visuais, de seu significado, de seu poder comunicativo – pois paradoxalmente, como indica o artista, \”como resultado desta somatória de negações, a uma afirmação da identidade individual, uma vontade de apelar à dúvida e ao ceticismo, um questionamento dos significados universais e globais.\”