Art Basel Miami Beach 2023: Alejandra Venegas

For our first participation in Art Basel Miami Beach Dürst Britt & Mayhew is proud to present a solo exhibition by Mexican artist Alejandra Venegas, comprising of wood carvings and a site-specific wall painting, which will envelop the viewer with a surreal landscape.

 Alejandra Venegas hand carves landscape scenes and natural motives from various sorts of wood native to Mexico, after which she colours them with gouache or oil. Uniting the natural, warm tones of the wood with stridently bright shades is a contrast she actively seeks for. Incorporating the natural irregularities of the wood makes it much more than just a panel to paint on and gives the work a definite sculptural character. For Venegas, these works have therefore become a meeting place between painting, sculpture and drawing, but also between nature and culture, the exterior and the interior.

The insistent tapping of the gouges on the block of wood is essential to give it shape, a task that generates different rhythms and points of concentration in Venegas’ work. For the artist, carving is a process of unveiling what each block of wood contains, therefore, each relief is the result of that discovery. Sculpting the surface allows the revelation of memory within nature, its perceptions and its testimonies; discovering the colour, aroma, texture and direction of the wood grains and knots is an important part of her relationship with the material.

The theme of her pieces is linked to her vision of natural phenomena, the climate and the seasonality of the upper zone of Xochimilco (on the southern outskirts of Mexico City), where she lives and works. Throughout her outings around Xochimilco, Venegas carefully observes the language of the plants and animals that surround her, and as part of these observations, the motifs of her reliefs emerge: seeds that sprout from the earth, plants and flowers, grasshoppers and other animals that surround the area, rain, the sun and their influence on the transformation of the landscape. But she also uses certain ornamental figures such as the spiral that symbolizes expansion and growth.

As all the works in the presentation are hand carved they bring the viewer into closer contact with a craft that is not that obvious anymore in our contemporary society. Moreover Venegas’s pieces present us with scenes that make us gaze longingly at an idea of nature that is disappearing from urban life, but which, if we look closely, is still there.