Melanie Smith. Farce and Artifice

Melanie Smith. Farce and Artifice is the publication that takes up the idea of the exhibition organised by the MACBA, jointly with the MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo and UNAM, in Mexico City, and the Museo Amparo, in Puebla, Mexico. It is the largest organised to date in Europe about the work of an artist who defies easy classification, born in England (Poole, 1965) but active on the Mexican art scene since the nineties. The publication reviews the over 120 works brought together in this show and reproduces the broad range of media that Smith uses to express herself: from her early sculptures, assemblies, reliefs and paintings to her work in video, photography and installation. The selection of images in the book, as in the exhibition, is thematic rather than chronological, divided into different areas: Abstraction, Urban, Colour, Archaeology, Body, Nature and Scale. The book also includes an article by the exhibition’s curator, Tanya Barson, an interview with the artist by Cuauhtémoc Medina, chief curator at the MUAC, and an article by the Professor of Art History at the University of Connecticut, Robin Adèle Greeley.