Rubén Ortiz-Torres: Zonas de Colaboración

Rubén Ortiz-Torres (b. 1964) has been living and working in Los Angeles since 1990 and he became a professor of visual arts at UC San Diego in 2001. Ortiz-Torres was raised in Mexico City in a household where both folk and avant-garde musical traditions were highly regarded by his parents, who were the founders of the folk ensemble, Los Folkloristas. He began his career as a photographer, printmaker, and painter in Mexico City in the early 1980s, well before he received his MFA from the California Institute of Arts in 1992.

Widely regarded as one of today's leading Latinx artists and an innovator in the 1980s of a specifically Mexican form of postmodernism, Ortiz-Torres is known for his critical, cosmopolitan, technically inventive and intellectually comical visual practice that explores the cultural paradoxes of the global art world through an informed convergence of popular and avant-garde art traditions.

Over the past ten years, Ortiz-Torres has produced a body of work in a wide range of media – extended series of photographs, altered readymades, a feature film, several videos, large scale video installations, major painting series, sculptures, customized cars and machines, photo-collages, performances, publications, and curated exhibitions. His art is a spectacular dissemination of the deconstruction of styles, the dislocation of paradigms of identity, and new forms of political aesthetics. He uplifts popular narratives and deep rooted indigenous and vernacular forms, in a practice that also acknowledges the teachings of Mexican modernism.

At the Wallach, Rubén Ortiz-Torres: Zonas de Colaboración foregrounds new directions in Ortiz-Torres’s practice over the past five years (since his survey exhibition at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). The exhibition pays special attention to works produced collaboratively in Los Angeles, California, and Guadalajara, Mexico. The Los Angeles section includes paintings on junked patrol car hoods created in collaboration with mechanics, engineers, and digital designers between 2020-23. In Guadalajara he is working with artisans at Taller Mexicano de Gobelinos (tapestries), Cerámica Suro and Taller NODO (ceramics), and Taller F (photography) while in residency there during 2023-24.