Melanie Smith. Farce and Artifice

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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.

year of publication

2019

support

Printed

editorial policy

Exhibitions

editions

Spa 978-84-92505-97-5 , Eng 978-84-92505-98-2

author/s

Tanya Barson Robin Adèle Greeley Cuauhtémoc Medina Melanie Smith

pages

160

design

Design by Cristina Paoli – Periferia

year of publication

2019

author/s

Tanya Barson Robin Adèle Greeley Cuauhtémoc Medina Melanie Smith

support

Printed

pages

160

editorial policy

Exhibitions

design

Design by Cristina Paoli – Periferia

editions

Spa 978-84-92505-97-5 , Eng 978-84-92505-98-2

artist

Melanie Smith

Poole

1965

see detail

Melanie Smith was born in Poole, England, in 1965. After studying Fine Arts, in 1989 she left behind the political and economic tensions in the United Kingdom of Margaret Thatcher to settle in Mexico, where she has witnessed the impact of capitalist modernisation, neoliberal globalisation and hyper-consumerism. Both Latin American and British contexts are essential to her work, which explores, through performances, sculptures, videos and photographs, the contradictions between the supposed rationality of modernity and the farce, deception and chaos on which it is based. Although Smith does not define herself as a painter and works with a wide variety of media, all her production is imbued with a unique and persistent reference to painting.

She has exhibited at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (2004); Tate Britain, London (2006); Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA (2009); Museo de Arte, Lima (2011); Museo Amparo, Puebla (2013); Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam (2014); and MACBA, Barcelona (2018). Her work is in numerous public and private collections, such as the British Council, London; Tate Modern, London; MoMA, New York; Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Museo Amparo, Puebla; and MACBA, Barcelona.