The projects in exhibition at Museo Experimental El Eco by artists Leonor Antunes and Praneet Soi, reveal and confront the aesthetic structures of the museum spaces. In a contemporary context, these pieces provoke a distanced, critical reading of the architectural conditions conceived by Mathias Goeritz. 

The installation created by Leonor Antunes (Lisbon, 1972) derives from a revision of the formal discourse of the museum, in addition to other works by Mexican modernists. Her interest in aesthetic modern innovations leads to a dialogue with the greatest minds of the time, which enables her to produce disruptive interventions.

For Discrepancies with Mathias Goeritz, Antunes reinterprets the aesthetics of artists such as Goeritz and Carlos Mérida. These formal languages are reflected in the use of industrial materials and tensile and triangular forms. The patterns on the floor and ceiling mimic the geometries of the museum, and the hanging structures resemble the abstract shapes of an unrealized mural designed by Mérida for the museum. With these interventions, Antunes evokes the formal intentions of these modern artists, while generating a discrepant response. This discrepancy arises from Antunes’s anachronistic re-reading, thus revealing its contemporary condition.

In the case of Critical Estrangement, Praneet Soi (Kolkata, 1971) explores the position of the body within the goeritzian space through drawing. Soi’s work examines the discursive potential of human silhouette as a means to question contemporary political and spatial structures. The body is revealed as object and victim of conflict. This condition is addressed with the possibilities of drawing, as well as media imagery, as spatial formats. 

Consequently, human figures appear on paper and cardboard, and inhabit the white walls of the room. By folding these media, the implications of drawing are transferred to space. The pieces of cardboard are cut and pleated to produce spatial drawings; the silhouettes on the walls occupy corners, sometimes invading contiguous walls only fragmentarily. 

In this way, drawing overcomes its flatness. The fold generates space; the drawing becomes body. The body portrayed by Soi is a victim of the contemporary condition: Soi obtains his silhouettes from the press, bodies that confront political, social, economic and ecological conflict. The drawn body therefore reveals its contemporary situation; at the same time it invades space and architecture.

These are the last exhibitions at Museo El Eco under the direction of Tobías Ostrander. Since Ostrander took the role in 2010, the museum has generated an authentic effervescence in its commissions and public programs. With the project Museum as Hub, the Eco was linked to an international circuit of museums (which includes Museo Tamayo and The New Museum in New York) that join forces to position the contemporary museum as a place for discussion, criticism and learning. This vision has been the starting point for the series of architectural pavilions and commissioned art interventions, as well as collaborations with other organizations like Liga or Storefront for Art and Architecture.

The projects in exhibition explore the role of Museo Experimental El Eco, both as an institution and as space, among the heritage of Mexican modernism and recent aesthetic explorations. Leonor Antunes and Praneet Soi propose critical interpretations that confront modernist innovations with the contemporary. The Eco thus reinforces its position as a truly experimental museum