Felipe Ehrenberg
São Paulo, SP - CEP 05422-020
Brasil
Tel.: (55 11) 3057-1855 / (55 11) 9507-2447
Email: kbajin@yahoo.com
Site: http://www.ehrenberg.art.br/mortes/index.html
Din A4 - Felipe Ehrenberg
CV breve English
Born in 1943 in Mexico City, Felipe Ehrenberg counts on an extensive curriculum that is hybrid and difficult to define.
His artistic activities for the most part focus on drawings, paintings, and sculptures. He is known for his affirmation of conceptual nature. He has also made literary contributions as an essayist and specialty columnist. He boasts over a hundred international exhibitions. He was co-founding publisher of Beau Geste Press/Libro Acción Libre in England where he has also published works.
“…Most importantly, many North American performance artists have experienced the isolation of small, specialized audiences and the pressure to do more accessible work. Postmodernist critics have christened this dilemma as the problem of high culture vs. mass culture. Artists experience it as a problem of performance vs. entertainment. But consider instead the alternative response of an artist like Felipe Ehrenberg and his project of the reconstruction of Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake. For him, the goal is not to be a pop star, but a responsible citizen/activist. At the moment, his community is Tepito, the devastated neighborhood in the city of his birth, Mexico D.F. …”
by emily hicks
Felipe Ehrenberg - Other works
CV breve español
Felipe Ehrenberg nació en la ciudad de México en 1943. A muy temprana edad sé capacitó como prensista y después como pintor y grabador, bajo la tutela de grandes maestros como Mahthías Goeritz y José Chávez Morado. Es reconocido como artista multidisciplinario. Su obra figura en celebres colecciones en el extranjero. Este artista se abocó a la experimentación y con el paso del tiempo, se le ha reconocido como uno de los pioneros más provocadores e importantes de obra propositiva en el Continente Iberoamericano, Su producción abarca desde el dibujo, la pintura, la escultura y la gráfica, hasta el arte ambiental y de acción (performance). También se ha destacado como teórico, ensayista y columnista especializado. Vidrios rotos y el ojo que los ve, es el titulo de un libro que recientemente le fue publicado por el Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.
Felipe Ehrenberg - Other works
More about the artist
A recurrent subject in Ehrenberg’s work is Death as conceived by tradition in Mexico. His best
known work is the conspicuous tattoo he designed for his left hand in homage to Jose Guadalupe
Posada, the turn-of-the-century engraver considered the precursor of modern Mexican art.
Invariably, every year for the past two and a half decades, the artists presents either an
exhibition of drawings, paintings or a large installation, in fact a non-traditional altar, to
celebrate the Day of the Dead.
Fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and English, Ehrenberg has been a guest artist
at art centers and cultural institutions, such as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the
University of Rio Piedras in Puerto Rico, the Manuel Belgrano Academy of Art of Buenos Aires, and
the Washington Project for the Arts. He is also a welcomed juror, speaker and panelist at national
and international cultural encounters. He is an assiduous essayist and specializes on art theory
and contemporary culture. A selected anthology of his published texts, titled “Vidrios rotos y el
ojo que los ve (Broken glass and the eye that looks at it)”, was issued early in 1996 by the
Consejo Nacional Para la Cultura y las Artes (CNCA), in Mexico.
In the Fall of 1990, as a visiting artist at Nexus Press, (Atlanta), he published the Codex
Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis, an anthological book-object that gathers his most recurrent stencil
iconography. In October that same year, commissioned by the Archer Huntington Gallery of the
University of Texas at Austin, Ehrenberg created a large, out-door installation titled “Light Up
Our Border - I” and on the following November he built the “Light up Our Border - II” installation
piece at the Bridge Center For Contemporary Art, in El Paso, Texas. These two works, as well as
several more he has created in recent years, deal with the relationship between Mexico and the U.S.
Late in 1994, invited to participate inSITE 94, Ehrenberg built TERCERA LLAMADA / CURTAIN
CALL, a diptych installation at the Centro Cultural de Tijuana (CECUT), in Mexico, and at the Santa
Fe Train Depot in San Diego. In 1995, he participated in Configura-2 (Erfurt, Germany) where he
built “Tzompantli”, an out-of-doors installation made with 15th Century beams and planks. This last
work became the very first installation piece to be acquired for the collection of the Museum of
Modern Art in Mexico.
For his achievements in art and related activities, Ehrenberg has been distinguished with several awards, foremost the Roque Dalton Medal (1987) for his work during the aftermath of the Salvadoran earthquake, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1976), a Fulbright Lecturing Award and Mexico’s CNCA Grant for Mid-career Artists (1991). He was also awarded the Femirama Prize (Argentine, 1968) for painting, and the Perpetua Prize for book design and illustration (England, 1974). He was a Fellow in Mexico’s National System for Creators from 1993 to 1999.
