During the 1960s, the Dynamic Museum transformed a series of nonconformist houses designed by Manuel Larrosa into ephemeral exhibition spaces. Through a selection of original artworks and documents, Mario García Torres recovers the memory of these events, while recapturing their fleeting and festive nature in a series of contemporary gestures. “The party was yesterday (an no one remembers anything)” is on show at the Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura in Mexico City.
The party was yesterday
Mario García Torres recovers the memory of the 60s’ Dynamic Museum, where artists took over some unconventional houses by Manuel Larrosa in Mexico City.
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- 24 February 2017
- Mexico City
On the evening of September 6, 1962, a group of young, avant-garde, anti-establishment artists who would eventually be recognized as part of the “Breakaway Generation” (or Generación de la Ruptura) occupied the rooms, hallways and gardens of an odd-looking house of unconventional proportions and geometries designed by Manuel Larrosa – an experimental architect in his early thirties. They hung abstract paintings on the walls, placed sculptures in unexpected nooks and crevices, used staircases and windows as backdrops for stagings and dance performances. That night, the house at Tepexpan 14, in the sleepy, cobblestoned neighborhood of Coyoacán, Mexico City, was transformed into the first Dynamic Museum, a project conceived as part museum, part theater, part happening, part get-together, by Larrosa himself along with former director of the National Institute of Fine Arts, Miguel Salas Portugal.
Larrosa and Salas Portugal created the Dynamic Museum to house the artists that were ostracized from the museums and cultural institutions of the time: they featured painting and sculpture by Manuel Felguérez, Lilia Carrillo, Alberto Gironella, Vicente Rojo, Fernando García Ponce, Angélica Gurría, Luis Nishizawa, Enrique Climent, Enrique Echeverría and Waldemar Sjölander, among others, along with photographs by Nacho López and works by other emblematic artists like Alejandro Jodorowsky and Juan José Gurrola, whose unconventional practices had ties with theater, performance art, and conceptual art. The Dynamic Museum became a platform to question and denounce the institutional apparatus and the cultural status quo of 1960s Mexico.
until 6 May 2017
The party was yesterday (an no one remembers anything)
curated by: Mario García Torres
Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura
calle General Francisco Ramírez 4, Mexico City