Mario García Torres

Courtesy of the artist, Sprüth Magers, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich and New York

Mario García Torres (Monclova, 1975) is an artist currently living in Mexico City. He received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2005) Toner Series: This painterly series is made by pouring toner—a runny dust composed of microscopic grains normally used to make photocopies—over canvas.

One could say that these monochromes are time-based works: a narrative emerges as the material progresses over the surface, from top to bottom.

As direct records of an irreproducible accident, the Toner works negotiate gesture and environment, capturing the slightest changes in the particles’ drift. They subtly cite a historical body of work by two artists that García Torres had already dedicated works to: Robert Smithson pouring asphalt over land, and Alighiero Boetti photocopying the rain. The photocopier—a near-obsolete technology, like film and slide projectors—was adopted by artists since immediately after its inception, in the 1960s. Conceiving these works as monochrome paintings, García Torres strips his emblematic material of its associations with a deadpan machine aesthetic and cheap reproducibility, focusing instead on its erratic nature and on the impossibility of its reproduction outside the machinery.

In his work García Torres explores the potential of a diverse range of media including photography, film, performance in order for it to serve as a tool in his own re-examination of concerns related to history and conceptual art practice in which there is always a time or location displacement. In so doing, he derives an new idea from history and reality.

His recent solo exhibitions include The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2018) co-organized with WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2019); the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2015); the Pérez Art Museum Miami (2014); Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2013); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010); and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2007). He has also, participated in numerous international exhibitions including Manifesta 11 (2016); the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014); dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel (2012); São Paulo Biennial (2010); Taipei Biennial (2010); Yokohama Triennale (2008); and Venice Biennale (2007). He does not date his work. 

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