MEXICO CITY.- It is an anonymous hand that fires a gun to the head of visual artist Daniel Joseph Martinez (Los Angeles, 1957). It's a huge hyper-realistic photo which carries the viewer to a stereotyped violent world: Colombia, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan … However it's none of these places. It's anywhere. Maybe Los Angeles, maybe Tijuana... It's just the Martinez's self portrait entitled “George and Daniel in an insane world ...” This is one of the 27 new artwork pieces recently acquired by the Alvar Carrillo Gil Museum for contemporary art in Mexico City.
The new Alvar Carrillo Gil Museum's collection will be exhibited until next September 2013. It's a random gathering of contemporary visual art pieces acquired as gifts or tax payment in kind that illustrate how daily urban violence is becoming an Art issue for creators like Jonathan Hernandez, Cannon Bernáldez, Alejandro Montoya, Enrique Guzmán, Carlos Amorales and Moris, among other Mexican painters, photographers and installation artists.
All of them, jointly with Chicano Daniel Joseph Martinez, are the new prime art workers for Mexico's 21st century Art Heritage and they are setting up a standard of contemporary art through their vision of the continuous social violence in nameless cities.
Some of the artwork pieces in the new Alvar Carrillo Gil Museum collection had already been exhibited right there in late 2011 and early 2012, as lent artwork for an exhibition entitled Tiempos Violentos (Violent Times), that was an aesthetic concept of violence.
It is important to emphasize that the Alvar Carrillo Gil Museum's founding artwork collection are some of the renowned Clemente Orozco's drawings and paintings which reveal the violent scenery, the social morality as well as the ravaged landscapes of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary times of the early twentieth century.
The curator of the current exhibition, Carlos E. Palacios, said that “the artwork of the contemporary Mexican artists show other kinds of violence, other sensitivities and the landscapes of Mexico in the twenty-first century.” 👣
