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LAGOS Berlin @ MOMENTUM AiR
ARTIST RESIDENCY
#9
Guillermo Olguín
15 March – 15 April 2024
OPEN STUDIO
13 April 2024 @ 12 – 5pm
Foreign Object
Artist Residency Presentation by Guillermo Olguín
@ MOMENTUM-LAGOS
Kunstquartier Bethanien, rm 134
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
ARTIST BIO:
Guillermo Olguín Mitchell was born in Mexico City in 1969. He lives and works in Oaxaca and Mérida, México.
Olguín completed professional studies at the Cornish School of Arts in Seattle, Washington, USA and postgraduate studies at the Budapest Hungary Art Academy.
He works in several mediums such as photography, graphic art and drawing but is primarily known for his painting. His work often depicts pagan rites and mythology, but is heavily influenced by Mexican art, particular from the state of Oaxaca.
Olguín’s work has been exhibited around the world in countries such as: Mexico, United States, Cuba, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, Hungary, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, Finland and Japan. His work is collected by private collectors across the Americas and Europe and by museums such as the Art Museum of Oaxaca and the Graphic Arts Institute of Oaxaca.
CURATOR’S STATEMENT
Berlin Artist Residency Project 2024
luego lo pulo un poco y agrego algo de Europa.
The Migrant Object
or
The Foreign Object
Guillermo Olguín’s interest in the phenomenon of migration stems from his own experience, as the child of a European migrant mother in Mexico.
The artist has travelled and lived in different parts of the world and understands himself to be a migrant artist even in his own place of origin in Oaxaca, Mexico, itself both a source and site of international migration.
This project, carried out during Guillermo’s residency with MOMENTUM-LAGOS, is constructed from interventions of objects collected from flea markets, including in Berlin, among them discarded photo albums and landscape paintings reflective of the artist’s interest in European Romanticism.
These canvases and photographs can themselves be understood as foreign objects, moving in territory and in time, and carrying with them the stories of those who owned them or are represented within them.
Other canvases included here have been worked on across continents, traveling with Guillermo’s “valise de peintre” and, like the artist, transformed on the journey. These works found their final form during this Residency.
Echoing stories of migrants he has lived with, interviewed and observed, the work references the passage of travellers moving North through Oaxaca from South and Central America, Asia and Africa, part of an intensifying phenomenon of global migration.
The finished works speak to the experience of the migrant, the newly arrived, the melancholy and strangeness of unfamiliar landscapes, vegetation, fauna, climate and culture.
These images echo characters, emotions and realities that Guillermo has lived on his own journeys.
They sit within decades of investigation by the artist and are at once his own response to Berlin, in the last throes of winter and the first days of spring, and a reflection of this European capital’s mutable and multicultural nature.
– Luis Carrera-Maul & Frank Jack
The MOMENTUM AiR / LAGOS Berlin
ARTIST RESIDENCY
is part of the
LAGOS Mexico City / MOMENTUM Berlin
RESIDENCY EXCHANGE