For the third edition of the series Schultze Projects, Minerva Cuevas (*1975 in Mexico City) will develop a new site-specific work for the main staircase of the Museum Ludwig. The name of the series refers to Bernard Schultze and his wife Ursula (Schultze-Bluhm), whose estate is managed by the Museum Ludwig, and in whose memory every two years since 2017 an artist has been invited to create a large-scale work for the prominent front wall of the stairway to the permanent collection.
Minerva Cuevas is known for her research-based projects, which she exhibits in the form of installations, performance, video, and painting. She is interested in economic and environmental issues and their socio-political interrelations. Cuevas often refers to the specific context in which her work is created. For example, for the exhibition marking the fortieth anniversary of the Museum Ludwig, she developed a work that referenced the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation, which was established in 1982 under the name Ludwig Stiftung für Kunst und Internationale Verständigung GmbH (Ludwig Foundation for Art and International Understanding). She designed an installation made of a black rectangular wooden frame with red, yellow, and blue accents, whose composition recalled Piet Mondrian’s abstract painting Tableau I. Its purchase was very controversial at the time, and today it is one of the highlights of the Museum Ludwig’s collection. In this installation, similar to some of her other works, the artist deals with the potential and effects of artistic practice for society. In this sense, Minerva Cuevas sees art as an active contribution to social changes. She uses painting more as a means to an end rather than as an examination of the medium’s conditions and rules. For her large-scale murals she sometimes uses the language of advertising, including the logos of specific brands, which she substantially alters. Following her critical approach, with her painting Minerva Cuevas illustrates the negative effects of consumption and the economic orientation of human activity on society and the environment.
Minerva Cuevas’s solo exhibitions include: Disidencia, Mishkin Gallery, New York (2019); No Room to Play, daadgalerie, Berlin (2019); Dissidência, Galpão VB – Associação Cultural Videobrasil, São Paulo (2018); Fine Lands, Dallas Museum of Art (2018); Minerva Cuevas, Museo de la Ciudad de México (2012); Landings, Cornerhouse, Manchester (2012); S·COOP, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2010); Minerva Cuevas, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2008); Phenomena, Kunsthalle Basel (2007); Das Experiment 6: MVC Biotechnologies – Für ein natürliches Interface, Secession, Vienna (2001); On Society, MC Kunst, Los Angeles (2007); Egalité, Le Grand Café – Centre d’art contemporain, Saint Nazaire (2007); Schwarzfahrer Are My Heroes, daadgalerie, Berlin (2004); Mejor Vida Corp, Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (2000).
Curator: Yilmaz Dziewior
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