Pedro Reyes
Pedro Reyes has won international attention for large-scale projects that address current social and political issues. Through a varied practice utilising sculpture, performance, video, and activism, Reyes explores the power of individual and collective organisation to incite change through communication, creativity, happiness, and humour. A socio-political critique of contemporary gun culture is addressed in Reyes’s Palas por Pistolas (2008), in which the artist worked with local authorities in Culiacán, Mexico, to melt down guns into shovels, intended to plant trees in cities elsewhere in the world. Similarly, in Disarm (2013) the Mexican government donated over 6,700 confiscated firearms for Reyes to transform into mechanical musical instruments, which are automated to play a delightful, if surreal loop, retaining the raw emotion of their origination. Issues of community and compassion are addressed in Sanatorium, activated at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2011, dOCUMENTA (13) in Germany in 2012, and in 2014 at The Power Plant in Toronto and The Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami. In this work, visitors are invited to sign up for a ‘temporary clinic,’ with the mission of treating various kinds of urban malaise. His immersive exhibition Doomocracy, organised by Creative Time at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, was a 'political house of horrors' marking the confluence of two events haunting the American cultural imagination at the time: Halloween and the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Reyes (b. 1972, Mexico City) lives and works in Mexico City. He studied architecture at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City. Solo exhibitions have been held with MARTa Herford, Herford, Germany (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico (2022); Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (2020); SCAD, Georgia, USA (2019); Creative Time, New York, USA (2016); Dallas Contemporary, TX, USA (2016); La Tallera, Cuernavaca, Mexico (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2015); ICA, Miami, FL, USA (2014); The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2014); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA (2011); Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA (2011); CCA Kitakyushu, Japan (2009); Bass Museum, Miami, FL, USA (2008;) and San Francisco Art Institute, CA, USA (2008). Reyes has participated in group exhibitions at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2015); The National Museum of XXI Century Arts (MAXXI), Rome (2015); Beijing Biennale, China (2014); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2013); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012); Liverpool Biennial, UK (2012); Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2012); Lyon Biennale, France (2009); and the 50th Venice Biennale, Italy (2003). In Fall 2016, Reyes served as the inaugural Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Current and recent projects:
'Sociatry', MARTa Herford, Herford, Germany, 26 March - 14 August 2022
Exhibitions
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Pedro Reyes: Pohua
28 July – 14 August 2022
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Pavilions
14 January – 12 February 2022
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Pedro Reyes: Tlali
6 May – 18 June 2021
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Horizon
6 October – 31 October 2020
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Pedro Reyes: Glyptotek
2 March – 21 April 2018
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Pedro Reyes
28 February – 15 April 2017
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Pedro Reyes: Statues
28 May – 18 July 2014
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Pedro Reyes: Disarm
27 March – 4 May 2013