LABOR, a contemporary art gallery located in Mexico City, presents its inaugural exhibition, "Labor, Labor. 7 | 11 | 2009", a group show by the gallery artists:
Erick Beltrán
Etienne Chambaud
Santiago Cucullu
Irene Kopelman
Teresa Margolles
Pedro Reyes
Jorge Satorre
Pablo Vargas Lugo
Héctor Zamora
LABOR was conceived with the following basic commitments:
• LABOR seeks to reinvigorate artistic and cultural development in Mexico City, producing work that reflects the multiple relationships between art and life.
• LABOR assumes the form of a contemporary art gallery, yet it breaks from archetypal notions of what a commercial gallery should be. It seeks to distance itself from the sphere of consumption and artistic hedonism, with the goal of strengthening a sustainable cultural economy that upholds the essence of contemporary artistic labor.
• LABOR represents artists who create critical projects that question and/or reflect our present circumstances, and whose work has a rigorous conceptual foundation. It is committed to showing the unique way that artists see the world, with exhibits that provide, above all else, a life experience.
• LABOR also exhibits the work of artists who are not commercially represented by the gallery, but who have nevertheless produced a body of work of seminal importance to contemporary art.
• LABOR strives to nurture the market with strategies and tools that will encourage the formation of new collectors and active publics. It will re-circulate a percentage of the income from the gallery’s commercial practice into an active program of residencies and sponsorships for exhibits and artistic projects.
• The gallery will feature an open library and a constant program of parallel activities (workshops, lectures, conferences and film screenings) and will produce a range of collectible publicity items, to function as physical traces of the importance of artistic labor.
• Eventually, these practices will benefit those individuals and agents who operate within the art system: artists, institutions, critics, publications, curators, museums, collectors and galleries.
