Art review: Felipe Ehrenberg at Museum of Latin American Art | Culture Monster | Los Angeles Times

Culture Monster

All the Arts, All the Time

« Previous Post | Culture Monster Home | Next Post »

Art review: Felipe Ehrenberg at Museum of Latin American Art

June 15, 2010 | 11:45 am

Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg is probably best known for voluminous printed works -- stenciled pictures, booklets, altered photographs, Xeroxes, performance audio tape, etc. -- made in loose association with the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and '70s. That international network of artists and composers was committed to art as time-bound ephemera.

But in 1973, while he was self-exiled in the United Kingdom to avoid political problems at home, he made a small sculpture titled "Silent Sound Box #1." The modest object is a wooden cigar box adorned with piano keys. Amid nearly 200 works in Ehrenberg's engaging traveling retrospective at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, the small sculpture is something of a touchstone.

Partly that's because of its form. The show of course includes much printed ephemera, including stenciled self-portraits of the handsome, grinning artist that recall the posters for political candidates one sees all over Mexico. But boxes also turn up again and again.

Rows of stenciled self-portraits and floral bouquets are spray-painted on 1963's "Simply a flower [Made in Mexico] A Work from Sonora" -- a tall, wide, shallow wooden box that hangs like a painting on the wall. It suggests a conventional painting's flattened shipping container; here, however, the images painted inside are the box's contents, not a painting as a separate Art review: Felipe Ehrenberg at Museum of Latin American Art | Culture Monster | Los Angeles Times