Antonio Vega Macotela's work is multidisciplinary nature and designed to be carried out with communities and in specific places. Through his work the artist explores the notions of work, value and exchange, specifically with regard to the system through which social relations are established and negotiated. It also refers to alienation in economic systems and their social structures. Vega Macotela uses art as a tool for change and the re-meaning of the everyday life, as well as to re-contextualize it.
The artist is interested in the processes of creation, the interactions, negotiations and collaborations that these involve and which he places as his point of focus. His work is located at the intersection of several equivalence chains that connect work and artistic practice within a single economy, participating in prolonged temporalities.
Antonio Vega Macotela
Mexico City, Mexico, 1980. Lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico and Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
«The work of Vega Macotela creates a territory in which we can talk about economy as a system that creates representations and interactions.»
The work of Vega Macotela creates a territory in which we can talk about economy as a system that creates representations and interactions. In personal terms of the artist “art is significant, it is symbolic. The actions that affect society are also symbolic and the work of the artist lies in working with those symbols and those meanings. It is about expanding wills and generating possibilities to see and think”."
Time exchange 148 | 2008 | Cigarette butts | 8.27 x 11.02 inches
Time exchange 63 | 2006 | Pen on paper 11.02 x 16.93 inches
Antonio Vega Macotela is currently an artist in residence at the Brooklyn campus of the Amant Foundation (New York). He has undertaken other residencies at Gasworks in London (2018), Rijksakademie in Corea (2015) and Amsterdam (2011-2012), and Le Pavillon, Palais du Tokio in Paris (2014).
Selected exhibitions: 34th Bienal de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo Brazil (2021) ; Highline Art, New York (2021); Toi et moi, on ne vit pas sur la même planète”, Centre Pompidou-Metz (2021); 12º Bienal de Taipei, Taipei, China (2020) ; “#TodosSomosHonolulu”, LABOR, Mexico City, Mexico (2020) ; “Fin del Futuro”, La Tallera, Cuernavaca, Mexico (2019) ; “Incendio”, CIAP, Hasselt, Belgium (2019) ; “Confortably Numb”, Another Space, New York, United States (2018) ; “Constructing the World: Art and Economy 2008-2018”, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany (2018) ; “Stories of Almost Everyone”, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, United States (2018) ; documenta 14, Kassel, Germany (2017) ; “Lecturas de un territorio fracturado”, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2017) ; “Asymmetrical Warfare”, Witte de With Contemporary Art Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2015) ; “Pheidippidics – Studies on Exhaustion”, LABOR, Mexico City, Mexico (2015).
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