FOCUS: Mario García Torres

April 11-June 28, 2015

The FOCUS series is organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth for the Director's Council, a group that supports acquisitions at the Museum. The series features three solo exhibitions annually, with Assistant Curator Alison Hearst organizing FOCUS: Mario García Torres. FOCUS exhibitions are open to the public and are included in general museum admission: $10 for adults; $4 for seniors (60+) and students with identification; free for children 12 and under; free for Modern members.

The work of Mexico City-based artist Mario García Torres is the subject of the third and final exhibition in the 2014-2015 season of the Director's Council FOCUS series.

García Torres explores obscure stories and activities associated with conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s, using a variety of media for each of these projects, including video, photography, and sculpture. Focusing on relatively unknown events from larger, more well-known passages in art history, García Torres analyzes how history is constructed, interpreted, and transformed. He juxtaposes established facts with imagined scenes and dialogue, emphasizing how the divisions between truth and fiction are blurred. Further, the artist investigates subjectivity and nostalgia and how they come into play through author and reader biases when history is retold.

For FOCUS: Mario García Torres, the artist addresses a specific time frame in the career of noted American artist Robert Smithson (1938-1973), the years 1966 to 1973. During this period, Smithson worked on two projects in Texas - one lesser-known, unrealized proposal for the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport and one well-known work created posthumously, titled Amarillo Ramp, 1974.

In García Torres's cinematic narrative The Schlieren Plot, 2013, Smithson's airport proposal and Amarillo Ramp are used as springboards. Alongside García Torres's video and other interrelated works in this FOCUS exhibition, the actual drawings by Smithson from 1966 and 1967 that illustrate his plans for the Dallas/Fort Worth airport project will be displayed. These drawings are part of the Modern's permanent collection and serve as preparatory sketches not only to Smithson's never-completed project, but also, poetically, to García Torres's video on the same subject. As Schlieren unfolds, Smithson's plan for the airport is loosely re-imagined by García Torres. Schlieren also features a scene of the now-decaying semicircular earthwork Amarillo Ramp, seen from the vantage point of a helicopter. The in-flight view, paired with the airport plans, signals Smithson's tragic death in 1973, when his plane crashed while he was surveying the Amarillo site in preparation for his ramp piece. Schlieren and García Torres's other works illuminate such glimpses from the history of art, yet through his creative process, they also provide a new narrative relating to broader topics. As the artist has stated, "I see the art stories I sometimes use as starting points to begin research. Then, they become excuses to talk about something else."

Mario García Torres was born in 1975 in Monclova, Mexico, and currently lives in Mexico City. He received his BFA from the University of Monterrey in 1998 and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2005. García Torres has exhibited extensively, both nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina (MADRE), Naples; Project Arts Centre, Dublin; Frac Franche-Comté, Besançon, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Berkeley Art Museum, California; Kunsthalle Zürich; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; and the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris. The artist has participated in the 8th Berlin Biennale; Documenta 13, Kassel; 29th Bienal de São Paulo; and 52nd Venice Biennale. García Torres has been featured in group exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City; Malmö Konsthall, Sweden; and Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, among many others. FOCUS: Mario García Torres will be the first solo presentation of the artist's work in Texas.

The Director's Council

The Director's Council was formed in 1985 and supports the Modern with an annual acquisition for the permanent collection. The Director's Council sponsors the FOCUS series, which presents three solo exhibitions organized each year by the Museum curators. Each exhibition opens with an exclusive cocktail reception for the Council, giving the members an opportunity to meet the featured artist and discuss his or her work. One piece by each artist is chosen by the Museum director and curators to be part of the final selection voted on at the Council's Purchase Meeting each May. This format provides members with an in-depth understanding of the Modern's acquisitions process and offers a spirited and popular series of events. The annual dues, $600, include all the benefits of a Family membership and invitations to exclusive Director's Council events.  

Related Event

April 7, 7 pm

Tuesday Evenings Lecture with artist Mario García Torres in conversation with curator Alison Hearst