Jimena Mendoza
Cuerpo V

Mexican artist Jimena Mendoza has long been working with different materials and media. In addition to drawing and collage, mainly ceramics, glass, fabric and paint, in which the plane of craftsmanship is intertwined with free art in the form of complex spatial and sculptural installations. The choice of material plays an important role in her work; it can be seen in the context of the current interest in traditional applied media, which have expanded into the space of contemporary art in recent years.

The exhibition Cuerpo V presents new work by the artist, building on several projects of the last two years. The title of the exhibition can be translated as Body, which in this case does not refer directly to a human or other living being. The body figuratively becomes the gallery space itself, which the visitor enters. Mendoza's work is based on his long-standing research on mainly non-European and archaic cultures, traditional clothing, costumes and costumes. The colour variations, patterns, ornaments, embroidery and embossed applications form a rich patterning of elements, symbolic scenes and references to natural rhythms and structures. Also fundamental is the way of working with a repetitive arrangement of patterns, collage-like layering of materials and the joining of fabrics, whose practices and methodology Mendoza adopts and transforms into a purely abstracted installation combining canvas, paint and ceramic objects, composed in three exhibition halls. The gallery space is not decorated, but transformed into a scene full of elusive associative meanings and relationships, combining narrative and playful visual elements, in which the external and the internal, the large and the small, the concrete and the abstract, the natural and the human intermingle on another level.     

Jimena Mendoza studied at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado (ENPEG) in Mexico City, art in public space at L'Ecole Nationale Supérieure Des Arts Decoratifs (FONCA) in Paris and at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague. She is currently working as an assistant in Tomáš Hlavina's studio Sculpture 2 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

photo: Polina Davydenko