ERIN FROST AND
OTTO MARTIN MORENO
INFINITE UNFOLDING
KÖNIG MEXICO CITY
8 MARCH – 10 MAY 2024
KÖNIG MEXICO CITY is pleased to present INFINITE UNFOLDING, an exhibition featuring new works by Erin Frost and Otto Martin Moreno, emerging artists based in Mexico City. The show is comprised of 19 paintings by Frost and 5 sculptures by Moreno, the majority of which were created within the last year. Motifs related to floral and vegetal life abound in the works presented here, potential harbingers of the Spring to come, taking inspiration from the vibrant, organic character of the city both artists call home.
© Image by Oscar Aguilar
Frost’s paintings are made of tightly composed arabesques and flesh tones, which appear to fold and open within the constraints of the canvases’ dimensions. The effect of viewing Frost’s paintings is one that appeals both to ocular and bodily vision, releasing an energy filled with movement and permanent unfolding, as the title of the exhibition suggests. The corporeal nature of experiencing Frost’s work is intimately related to the performative processes that the artist uses to create her works, where contoured forms sit atop one another, echoing and repeating their shapes like a well-choreographed dance. In HARMONIA and SYZYGY, both made in 2023, Frost employs vertically oriented supports to create what look like intimate portraits of flowers, filled with gentle folds that appear animated by wind or some other subtle force. Frost’s compositions have a generative quality, as if the individual contours are themselves producing the resulting figures around them. In this sense, organic life is both a motif and a creative agent in these works, producing a unique and harmonious balance between form and content.
© Image by Oscar Aguilar
Moreno’s work in three dimensions achieves similar moments of balance and harmony through the creation of tension and contrasting component parts. In the diminutive A MEMORY OF FREE WILL, 2024, Moreno builds his sculpture out of fragments of curved pieces of bioplastic, finished with automotive paint. This antithesis of material – industrial and biodegradable – reinforces the object’s formal dialogue between individual sections, affixed to one another like a decomposing helix. These curved sections resemble brushstrokes that have been actualized into real space, engaging with sculpture’s unique identity as something both pictorial and figural, occupying a space shared by viewers while simultaneously separating itself from that space as an object to be seen. Here, unfolding takes place in a spatial and temporal sense, eliciting a multiplicity of perspectives anticipated by the fragmentary grammar of Moreno’s sculptural language.
© Image by Oscar Aguilar
With this exhibition of new work by Frost and Moreno, INFINITE UNFOLDING brings together two distinct voices in contemporary art based in the Mexican capital, united by their shared interest in the organic as both element and inspiration in their respective practices. Putting painting and sculpture into such intimate dialogue pays tribute to the unique sensibilities of both artists, as well as the lush ecology that influences their work.