Abraham Cruzvillegas

Abraham Cruzvillegas (born 1968, Mexico City) is a Mexican visual artist.

He is best known for his work with found objects, and particularly his ongoing "autoconstrucción" project.

Cruzvillegas grew up in Ajusco, a district in the south of Mexico City.

He studied Philosophy and Art at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

He later became a professor and went on to teach Art History and Theory at UNAM.

As a sculptor and writer, Cruzvillegas began as a central participant in a new wave of conceptual art in Mexico City during the 1980s and 90s, studying under Gabriel Orozco from 1987 to 1991 in the "Taller de los Viernes" sessions.

Orozco has been proposed as one of the "dominant influence(s)" on his work.

Along with Orozco, Damian Ortega, Dr Lakra, and Minerva Cuevas, Cruzvillegas was considered part of a new movement in Latin American art (which has been compared to the YBA boom in Britain in the 1980s. or the Modernist movement of the 1920s ).

Together with Gabriel Kuri, Lakra and Orozco, he participated in "Friday Workshops" (Taller de los Viernes) in the 1980s, a weekly meeting in which the artists met and collaborated.

This then developed into the artist-run space "Temistocles 44" in the 1990s, founded by Eduardo Abaroa and Cruzvillegas.

In 1994, his work was shown in the Fifth Havana Biennial; in 2002 in the XXV São Paulo Biennial; in 2003 in the Fiftieth Venice Biennale; in 2005 in the 1st Torino Triennale; in 2008 in the Bienal de Cali, in Colombia; in the Tenth Havana Biennial, and the Seventh Bienal do Mercosul in Portoalegre.

His work has been shown at the New Museum, New York City, at Tate Modern in London and at Aishti Foundation as part of the Trick Brain Exhibition in Lebanon.

As Cruzvillegas explained in the exhibition catalogue for 'Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City (2007): "We learned together to discuss, criticise, and transform our work individually, with no programmes, marks, exams, diplomas or reprisals. We did not intend to become known, prepare for a show, go against the grain, make our presence felt as a group, or even make work … this was my education".

From 2007 onwards, Cruzvillegas has produced a series of works exploring what he calls autoconstrucción, or self-construction.

As described by Chris Sharp in Art Review, "'autoconstrucción has been able to manifest in [...] many guises, places and modes: from small autonomous sculptures to large sculptural-cum-architectural installations; from mobile musical collaborations to an hourlong film, even a play. Autoconstrucción is multiplicity incarnate. Indeed, the term could be said to designate more of a spirit and an ethic than, say, a theory-driven aesthetic.'" Autoconstrucción is in part inspired by his hometown of Ajusco, a neighbourhood that was mostly built by collective effort, use of accessible materials at hand, and improvisation.

Christina Catherine Martinez stated in the Los Angeles Times in 2022, "Play is the substrate of autoconstrucción and its driving force, even as Cruzvillegas alternately breaks up and buttresses the idea with a catholic range of historical and artistic touchpoints, interests and memories."

Cruzvillegas himself stated in Art:21, "Sometimes, I just play with the materials, finding combinations, taking whatever is at hand [...] things, they speak, [and] I try to find a balance among them".

Autoconstrucción, writes art historian Robin Greeley, is "a sculptural practice of dynamic contingency derived from the ad hoc building procedures common in squatter settlements on the outskirts of megacities. [...] Cruzvillegas works with found materials in a process of inventive appropriation."

From 2012, this project was accompanied by works around the theme of "autodestrucción", Cruzvillegas explained that through the autodestrucción works he "wanted to show how "Internationalism" or "Style" is something that is to be appropriated, customized, modified, adapted and even destroyed, according to specific, local, individual, subjective needs."

Elements of the Autoconstrucción project were shown (amongst others) at Tate Modern in March 2012, in the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 2011, at the Walker Art Center in 2013, and at the Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2014.

His work is held in a number of collections, including Tate Modern, London and MoMA, New York.

Cruzvillegas has shown his work in single and group exhibitions in a number of galleries across Europe, South America and the United States.

Cruzvillegas participated in ROUNDTABLE: The 9th Gwangju Biennale, which took place September to November 2012 in Gwangju, Korea.

In August 2012, it was announced that Cruzvillegas had won the Fifth Annual Yanghyun Prize In 2014, he was the subject of a joint exhibition at both the Colección Júmex and the Amparo Museum.

In 2015, Cruzvillegas produced the Tate Modern Turbine Hall commission; his work, 'Empty Lot' was on display between 13 October 2015 and 3 April 2016.

The work consists of 240 wooden triangular plots bordered with wooden frames, filled with 23 tonnes of soil collected from different parks and gardens across London (including Hackney Marshes, Peckham Rye, the Horniman Museum and Buckingham Palace).

The entire work is raised on two large stepped, triangular scaffolded platforms, overlooked by growing light, and interspersed with smaller sculptural works.

In an interview with The Independent he stated, "'the history of mankind is based on movement, transformation, hope [but] owning a piece of land that is yours and for your family is the main hope of everybody – having a shelter, having a piece of land. This idea of hope is one that I’m dealing with in this work for the Turbine Hall.'" In her review for the Financial Times, Rachel Spence compared the work's "tidy blank triangles" to El Lissitzky and the work generally to Walter De Maria's New York Earth Room stating, "'The result is a work of art which works on more levels than the Shard: as process, as performance, as politics and as spectacle. Cruzvillegas says he hopes it will be somewhere 'that something can grow out of nothing'. Like a green-fingered Beckett, his less-is-more philosophy makes him a seer for our times.'" Writing for The Daily Telegraph, Mark Hudson noted the influence of "Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes and the grid-structured gardens of the Aztecs" and stated, "As a piece of gigantic sculpture, Empty Lot is one of the more dynamic and exciting of the Turbine Hall commissions.

It feels suspended like a geometric island, perfectly poised in the immense space." Jonathan Jones, writing in The Guardian, called it "lazy and complacent, as if unbothered by the challenge, uninterested in winning an audience", an artwork with "no aesthetic power and precious little to think about", selecting it as his "worst" installation in the Turbine Hall series.

This series of installations were shown in Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris (2017), the Hermès Foundation in Tokyo (2017), and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2017 - 2018).

He stated, "I had invitations to make projects in those cities. Then, I found a common thread with a link to a subjective circumstance happening at the time in the neighborhood where I was born and grew up in Mexico City — water scarcity [...] For me, constructing dams, expanding land overseas, or just creating political figures from left and right banks became material for a free, autonomous art project, using traditional music from the Huasteca region in Mexico. Three new lyrics were written as a starting point, addressing environmental, political, social, historical, economic, and aesthetic issues."

His works have been shown throughout America, Europe and Mexico.

He lives and works in Paris where he teaches sculpture at Ecole des Beaux-Arts since 2018.

From May to June 2018, kurimanzutto new york hosted an Autocontusión installation.

It included new pieces, such as a mural inspired by Manhattan.

In April 2018, Cruzvillegas created a site-specific installation at the Kitchen, New York made out of debris collected in the streets of Chelsea, housing a series of performances combining theatre, dance and aerial acrobatics.

The work incorporated instruments from different regions of Mexico like ocarinas, the jaw bones of donkeys and seashells.

In 2020-2021, Cruzvillegas curated a garden featuring more than 1,000 plants of 27 different species for a work called "Agua Dulce" at Collins Park outside of The Bass in Miami Beach; as part of the work, performers mimicked the song of birds and hum of insects.

In 2022, Cruzvillegas exhibited works entitled 'Tres Sonetas' at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, which "gravitate[d] around the rhythm and the structure of a poem by Concha Urquiza" of the same name.

In 2023, he gave the Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, entitled: “Centring: A Definitely Unfinished and Temporary Structure for Art Making”.