Mario García Torres (Mexico, b. 1975) is one of the most compelling and inventive conceptual artists living today. His work investigates the mechanisms of production of artistic thought and explores the unofficial or un-historicized points of intangible heritage; it is bound up with the facts, fictions, and live testimonials not listed in the typical accounts of conceptual art, its gestures, figures, and practices. Appropriation, narrative, repetition, and reenactment are just a few of the strategies that the artist employs to delve into the often-blurred division between truth and fiction. To express his ideas, García Torres uses a variety of mediums such as video, installation, photography, and sculpture. Each is carefully chosen to best address the subjectivity of historical records and the limitations of memory, which are at the core of the artist’s work.
Illusion Brought Me Here is the first US survey to focus on García Torres’s practice. Encompassing both galleries as well as the Bentson Mediatheque, the Walker’s self-select cinema, the exhibition features a selection of 35 works created over the past two decades, as well as two site-specific installations conceived exclusively for the Walker. A newly commissioned piece made from the soundtracks all of the artist’s media-based art serves as a dynamic audio framework to the show.
The exhibition is organized by the Walker Art Center and copresented with Wiels, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. After the Walker’s presentation, Illusion Brought Me Here travels to Wiels in May 2019.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the first publication to survey the artist’s work, produced by the Walker and Wiels and published by Walther König Verlag, Cologne.