Ana Roldán - Different Orders
13.8.-17.9.2011
“Different Orders” is the third solo exhibition of works by artist Ana Roldán (*1977, Mexico City) to be shown at annex14.
Two figures who have influenced the history of Mexican culture are of particular importance in connection with this exhibition, the artist and film-maker Adolfo Best Maugard and the architect Luis Barragan. Both are foremost representatives of a Mexican modernism that has been inspired by folk art and by the country’s pre-Colombian heritage. Ana Roldán makes diverse references to these, interested as she is in the different links between tradition and avant-garde and also in the paradox of a utopia-minded epoch simultaneously endebted to universal thinking and to national identity formation.
The artist has appropriated objects and methods used by the above-mentioned protagonists in various ways. In her paravant entitled Forms and Functions she superimposes a design method developed by Adolfo Best Maugard on design ideas by Luis Barragan to produce a hybrid object. In her mask-like works Head she renders stone heads abstract and transforms them so as to combine elements of pre-Colombian art with constructivist principles. The always latent allusions and references to Mexico’s cultural history thus form an ever-present open space of reference. This latter is simultaneously subverted by formal and thematic shifts and alterations. As a result, Roldán’s specific engagement becomes general, even taking on the aspect of a model. The building bricks are laid anew and the concepts of identity and authenticity in our day are subjected to re-negotiation.
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