Felipe Baeza: Through the Flesh to Elsewhere
Solo Exhibition | Feb. 15 - March 12, 2020
This is a past exhibition.
Felipe Baeza’s first institutional solo show brings together over sixty works produced over the last decade. Collectively, they explore the ways racialized, queered, and otherly-abled bodies are shaped through the violent brokering of power.
Felipe Baeza’s (b. 1987 Guanajuato, Mexico) practice is as much a confrontation with charged pasts—the ways we remember them and how they shape us—as it is a love letter to those whose sense of personhood is constantly litigated and defined by those in power. Born in Mexico, raised in Chicago, and now living and working in New York, Baeza trained as a printmaker—exploring the material and formal possibilities of the medium but perhaps more importantly its complicity in the construction of Western thought and its resulting modes of representation.
Mobilizing print production technologies that were instrumental in creating Othering mechanisms for the colonial project, Baeza’s early works encompass a series of etchings, prints, silkscreens, and photogravures that challenge the ways these forms have been violently used to act upon subjects.
This process led to Baeza’s conceptualization of what he calls fugitive bodies—racialized , queered, and otherly-abled persons whose existence transgresses multiple limitations of identity. The figures that emerge in his works—rendered in different states of visibility and cloaked with ancestral symbols and images—are not resolved but rather always in a process of becoming. What they share in common is an unabashed beauty sited beyond aesthetics.
For Baeza, beauty is emancipatory—liberating these bodies from the circumstances they’re prescribed to and allowing us to see them fully as they are and what they can be.
This exhibition traces these fugitive bodies as imagined by Baeza over the last ten years through more than sixty works.
About the Artist.
Felipe Baeza (b. 1987 Guanajuato, Mexico) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union in 2009 and a M.F.A. from Yale University in 2018. Baeza is the 2017 recipient of The Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Traveling Fellowship and The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation Traveling Fellowship. Solo exhibitions include La Emergencia de Hacer Memoria, Fortnight Institute, New York City (2019), and Felipe Baeza Maureen Paley, London (2018). Other recent exhibitions include Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Contemporary Art in the 50th Year of the Stonewall Era, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA (2019), as well as XL Catlin Art Prize, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California, USA, and No Longer Yours, The Mistake Room/Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico (2018).
Press
Feb. 2020 | Must See: Felipe Baeza: Through The Flesh to Elsewhere | ARTFORUM
Feb. 2021 | Felipe Baeza: Through The Flesh to Elsewhere | The Brooklyn Rail
Credit
Felipe Baeza: Through the Flesh to Elsewhere is organized by TMR and curated by César García-Alvarez, TMR Executive and Artistic Director.
This exhibition is part of Histories of a Vanishing Present, TMR’s 2019-2020 curatorial cycle exploring the global dynamics of postmemory. Major support for this cycle is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
TMR's program is made possible with the support of its Board of Directors, Big Mistake Patron Group, International Council, and Contemporary Council.
Support for this exhibition is provided by Maureen Paley, London.
Photo Credit: The Mistake Room. Copyright 2020. The Mistake Room Inc.
Installation Images: Ian Byers Gamber. Copyright 2020. The Mistake Room Inc.