Agustina Ferreyra

Hosting Paul Heyer (Chapter, NY), Michael Smith (Dan Gunn Gallery) and Michael Linares.

On the occasion of the first edition of Condo CDMX, Galería Agustina Ferreyra is proud to host Chapter, NY and Dan Gunn.

The work of Paul Heyer (Los Angeles, 1982) explores various modes of painting, shifting from abstraction to figuration – often combing the two into lyrical compositions. recurring materials include silk canvases worked with light washes and deft brushstrokes in oil and acrylic, combined to create subtle but rich surfaces. Pulling symbols from the everyday, art history and his own visual lexicon, Heyer’s work questions the nature of the known. The artist adopts recognizable markers not as carriers of precise meaning, but rather as opportunities to diffuse definition.

For over 35 years, Michael Smith (Chicago, 1951) has developed an incisive practice that engages the tragicomic aspects of American culture and the art world, teasing out facets of loneliness, consumerism, and the personal measures of success and failure in each.

Excuse Me!?!…I’m looking for the “Fountain of Youth, 2015, is a ballet choreographed by Stephen Mills and performed by Ballet Austin apprentices, with music by Mayo Thompson. The story centres around the theme of aging, with Mike’s younger coworkers representing the beginning and he the end, but everyone meeting in the Middle Ages for a refill at the ‘Fountain of Youth’. Smith’s instinct for popular genres dovetails with Mike’s slightly out-of-date tastes in his first foray into ballet, as he makes an honest effort to keep up with the art world’s au courant experimentation in dance. Additional chapters of Mike’s quest continue in two related photo series that document his junkets to the Old and New Worlds: the Fountain of Youth Archeological Park in Florida, and KidZania, a theme park where kids can step into the roles of adults.

Also exhibited are 14 photographs from Smith’s series Sears Class Portraits (1999 – present), depicting an amalgam of the everyman persona Mike, together with Smith the Artist and Smith the Professor, joined by generations of art students from nearly two decades of his teaching. Fitting right in while looking comically out of place in his avuncular role as a mentor of youth, the series chronicles the passage of time in Smith’s subtle physical changes, juxtaposed against the perpetual youth of his students.