Welcome
It may sound like a dusty snooze through Intro to Art History for anyone living in London, New York, or Paris, but Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo have come to Mexico City, and it’s a very big deal.
The blockbuster conjoined-twin exhibitions have smashed museum attendance records in Mexico and the historical significance of bringing these two artists’ work to Latin America for the first time makes this a trophy event for Palacio de Bellas Artes, the nation’s most important cultural center.
The movie poster for the 1968 Burt Lancaster film The Swimmer features a portrait of the star’s face dissolving into a swimming pool wake, and asks in that Vaseline-around-the-edges-soft-focus-dated-movie-poster-way, “When you talk about ‘The Swimmer’ will you talk about yourself?”
Spinning (2006) is a logical beginning for a survey exhibition of an artist whose practice was galvanized by the 1985 earthquake that devastated Mexico City. Leveling buildings and killing thousands, the quake forced citizens to hodge-podge makeshift systems for survival when the government failed to rescue the shaken metropolis. Spinning first takes stock of what still stands in the city’s view, and then whirls it into oblivion.
