Eugenio Ampudia
Melgar, 1958.
Eugenio Ampudia questions creative processes and the artist’s role through a multidisciplinary practice connecting art, viewers and exhibition spaces.
Artwork in the collection
Try Not To Think So Much, 2018
About the artwork
With this piece, Ampudia continues his line of work that emphasizes art as an effective means of communication. In this case, the artist plays with the paradox of breaking that flow through communicational noise. By applying the term "noise" to communication, he refers not only to an unpleasant sound, but also to any interference in the process. With this work, he alludes to the communicative noise we live with and that surrounds us, which becomes a silent method of influence in our everyday environment.
The artist questions communication in the art world, which tends to be endogamic and self-referential while proclaiming discourses that supposedly aim to bring culture closer to the viewer. The fact that the piece’s noise is built from the appropriation and layering of art-world lectures that are difficult to understand is an ironic nod to the theoretical apparatus and codes on which the art system is based. The phrase is a composite amplifier, and each letter within it has a disruptive mission, allowing Ampudia to construct a wavering narrative that also speaks to the subjectivity of discourse and opens the door to ideas such as the discourse of power or power as theorized by Foucault.
Artwork in the collection
Mala Hierba, 2015
About the artwork
"Mala Hierba" is a sculpture that plays at bringing to life a referential element such as weeds, breaking the space in which we recognize ourselves by making it breathe, and exploring our fears.
"It is too late to be afraid. There is nothing more unsettling than helplessly watching the movement of the grass beneath our feet. Those who prefer injustice to disorder cannot bear the forward drive of those who express no other destiny than to measure their own force—disordered, convulsive, and untamed. Risk is the message."
Artwork in the collection
Perec bajando una escalera, 2013
About the artwork
A library whose books do not have the strength to speak for themselves and need the help of the moving word behind them. And sometimes words are too specific. Or perhaps they have always been too specific for the world, for art, but above all for the present moment, and we find ourselves in urgent need of different codes and strategies.
Work on deposit from LaAgencia Collection.
Artistic career: Eugenio Ampudia
Artistic practice and research
As a multidisciplinary artist, his work approaches artistic processes from a critical perspective: the artist as a promoter of ideas, the political role of creators, the meaning of artworks, the strategies that bring them to life, the mechanisms of their production, promotion, and consumption, the effectiveness of spaces assigned to art, as well as the analysis and experience of those who view and interpret them.
Career and projects
His work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as ZKM (Karlsruhe), the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts (Amman), Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (Mexico City), Centro de las Artes de Monterrey, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, the Boston Center for the Arts (Boston), the Ayala Museum (Manila), The Whitechapel Gallery (London), Abierto X Obras (Matadero, Madrid), MAC Gas Natural Fenosa (A Coruña), Ars Electronica (Linz), and in biennials such as the The End of the World Biennial (Singapore) and Havana.
His work is also held in museum collections such as MNCARS, MUSAC, ARTIUM, IVAM, and Fundación ”la Caixa”, among others. His work Try Not Think So Much won the 13th edition of the ARCO-BEEP Electronic Art Award. Works in the collection: Intenta no pensar tanto, Mala Hierba, and Perec