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until 23.08. | #4728ARTatBerlin | neugerriemschneider (Linienstraße) shows from 12. July 2025 (Opening: 11.07.) the exhibition “nada me han enseñado los años” by the artist Mario García Torres.
In his fifth solo exhibition at neugerriemschneider, Nada me han enseñado los años (“All the years have taught me nothing”), Mario García Torres weaves time, memory and theatrical elements into a reflection on narrative strategies and the often too clear-cut concept of truth in images and reality. In this case, he applies his idea-based approach, with which he repeatedly addresses the global pa-tence of conceptual art and the art-historical tradition, to his native Mexico.
An essayistic set of new black-and-white oil paintings – the artist’s earliest figurative works – show motifs that have preoccupied him since The Gem and form a speculative chronicle of the country over the last hundred years. They are assembled in a storyboard and have an archival feel, but at the same time possess a genuine pictorial evidence that defies comprehension. Between the canvases, a crackling tension is created, while the interweaving and mutual reflection of intention, work and narrative create dialogues about the conditions of painting and the constantly changing role of the symbolic.
Mario García Torres, Floodlight Cameo (Cheems), n.d., © Mario García Torres. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Omar Bocanegra, Mexico City, oil and wax on canvas, 45 x 35.5 cm
García Torres sees the past as a seemingly infinite reservoir of possibilities that allows for a multitude of independent readings. In his practice, what is marked as completed becomes a beginning, a starting point for stories that are examined, expanded, di-mented and learned anew. Moments are transformed into spaces where construction and reality meet on the same plane. The supposed op-positions enter into an exchange, dissolve into each other and reveal paradoxes and new perspectives. In artistic experiments, the imaginary and the real merge in a lyrical wandering through unstable time. Perception and memory, full of incongruities and complex dependencies, become interrogation tools with which García Torres analyses the concepts of myth formation.
The historical basis for the narrative in Nada me han enseñado los años is post-revolutionary Mexico. In the search for a new national identity, driven by those who came to power after a decade of conflict, intellectuals – painters, photographers, playwrights and philosophers – worked to shape both the past and the future of their country. The subject of the series of paintings on display is a selection of these personalities, many of whom were avant-gardists and critics with a divided relationship to Mexico. Archival documents and their fictionalisation combine to create a constructed history and thus become an integral part of García Torres’ continuous search for and deconstruction of art movements.
Mario García Torres, The One Hotel’s Patio in Kabul During the 1970’s as Imagined by Artificial Intelligence Technology After a Portrait of Alighiero Boetti and Rémé His Owl Made by Giorgio Colombo With a Fragmented and Displaced Sun, n.d., Part of: Mario García Torres, A History of Influence. Fridericianum, Kassel. March 15 – July 27, 2025, © Mario García Torres. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Omar Bocanegra, Mexico City, oil and wax on canvas, 28.1 x 40.2 cm
Four works in which the artist engages with Salvador Novo (1904 – 1974) and Julio Antonio Mella (1903 – 1929) are representative of this endeavour. The motifs in these pictures were designed algorithmically and then painted in a heavily modified form. Salvador Novo, whose rebellious, at times provocative prose, poetry and drama characterise him as a leading Spanish-speaking thinker of the early 20th century, can be seen in a surreal portrait that shows him five times over. Originally an allusion to Marcel Duchamp’s multiple portrait from 1917, this constellation is rendered in a dreamlike blur in García Torres’ painting. The Novo Quintet sits at a table in a circle, embodying the multi-layered retrospection that is so often at the centre of García Torres’ artistic investigations
Mario García Torres, Portrait of a Mischievous Writer and Acute Critic of Early-20th-Century Intellectual Life in Mexico, Who Also Played an Important Role in the Development of Theater of the Era (Salvador Novo), n.d., © Mario García Torres. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Omar Bocanegra, Mexico City, oil and wax on canvas, 56.5 x 44 cm
The contrast between light and dark and the broad, curtain-like black brushstrokes turn the picture into a staged monologue that reveals the inner life of the person portrayed. Julio Antonio Mella was a founding member of the Cuban Communist Party. After years of political activism led to his persecution and arrest, he fled via Central America to Mexico City in 1926, where he was murdered under mysterious circumstances less than three years later at the age of 25. His partner, the Italian photographer and activist Tina Modotti, witnessed the night-time crime and came under suspicion. In order to exonerate her, the muralist Diego Rivera, who was a friend of the Mexican president at the time, organised a re-enactment of the murder for the authorities, in which the former actress Modotti directed and played the leading role. In his three works on this theme, García Torres links to the theatrical reality of this performance by depicting the scene at different points in time, which functions as a representation of subjective, non-linear and unresolved stories.
The paintings in the exhibition are arranged like a film, alternating staged compositions that drive the plot forward with images from areas as diverse as geological phenomena, everyday environments and internet culture. García Torres tells a story of representation, re-enactment, disappearance and appropriation that extends into the present day, exploring the illusory and the uncertain of the past and transporting it into the complicated present in a self-reflexive practice.
Mario García Torres, Tina Modotti And an Unknown Actor Recreating The Moment Before The End of Julio Antonio Mella, n.d., © Mario García Torres. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Omar Bocanegra, Mexico City, oil and wax on canvas, 84.4 x 60.5 cm
About Mario Garcia Torres
Until 27 July, the Fridericianum in Kassel is showing A History of Influence, the first institutional solo exhibition by Mario García Torres (born 1975) in Germany. Other museums and institutions that have dedicated solo presentations to the artist include MARCO, Monterrey (2021); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2020); WIELS, Brussels (2019); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2018 – 2019); TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna (2016); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2016); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth (2015); Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami (2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010); Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich (2008), and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2007). He participated in Desert X, Deser Hot Springs (2023); Sharjah Biennial 13, Sharjah (2017); Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016); the 8th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); the 29th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2012); and the São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2012). São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2010); the 7th Taipei Biennial, Taipei (2010); the Yokohama Triennial 2008, Yokohama (2008), and the 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice (2007). García Torres lives and works in Mexico City.
Opening: Friday, 11. July, 6 – 9 pm.
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 12. July – Saturday, 23. August 2025
To the gallery
Title image caption: Mario García Torres, A Strange Moment Painted After a Photograph of What I Believe to Be a Rehearsal for a Theater Piece by Leonora Carrington, n.d. © Mario García Torres. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Omar Bocanegra, Mexico City, oil and wax on canvas, 50 x 37.5 cm.
Exhibition Mario Garcia Torres – Galerie neugerriemschneider | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
