Mario García Torres

Biography

Mario García Torres was born in the Mexican city of Monclova in 1975. The interest of Mario Garcia Torres for art started a very young age, as he accompanied his mother in their hometown's museum, where she volunteered as a guide. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Monterrey in Mexico in 1998. While a student in Monterrey, he started getting interested in conceptual art. García Torres cited a group of his professors that were linked with American abstract expressionism as an influence in that direction. He continued his studies in the United States, and earned his Master of Fine Arts by the California Institute of the Arts in 2005, as a Fulbright grantee. In 2007 he received the Cartier Award at the Frieze Art Fair.

Work

García Torres work negotiates obscure events associated with conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, with the use of a variety of media. His work, based on past events around the history of conceptual art, tries to create new ideas and meanings through them. García Torres uses minor events for the creation of his narratives, as he believes that "some of them still have the potential to trigger questions both regarding their own nature, and regarding historiography".

In "In Some Places I Had Seen Before Moving to L.A.", he presents locations around L.A. in an attempt to reproduce the image he had about the city, based in what he saw in films or conceptual art works. His first solo exhibition in the United States presented "What Happens in Halifax Stays in Halifax". It was triggered during a conversation about art concepts with Jan Mot, and was initiated as a historic research project covering a 1969 art project which was assigned to NSCAD University students in David Askevold's class by artist Robert Barry. García Torres' work consisted of black and white slides and produced a reunion of the 1969 project class.

García Torres' Share-e-Nau Wanderings (A Film Treatment) was the artist's first attempt to approach the life and work of Alighiero Boetti, by creating a series of fictitious fax sheets, describing García Torres' imaginary trip in Kabul.

The project would occupy seven years of research and the production of a number of works. "¿Alguna vez has visto la nieve caer?" is a 50 minute slide show of black and white photographs of Kabul, taken by as anonymous photographers, and accompanied by sound. The project comprised photographs taken in the seventies, but the artist placed his work after the September 11 attacks, in an attempt to mingle different times and trigger the audience to question what it sees. With "Tea", García Torres documents in film his journey to One Hotel, the hotel operated by Alighiero Boetti in Kabul, further exploring his knowledge of Kabul and Boetti while tackling the also tense political climate in his own country.

With "Je ne sais si c'en est la cause", and "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger" García Torres gave documentation for two past works: Martin Kippenberger’s Museum of Modern Art Syros, and Daniel Buren's in-situ mosaics in Saint Croix. His work "My Westphalia Days" is a road movie containing fictitious events of the four-day disappearance of Michael Asher's trailer, which was presented in Skulptur Projekte Münster since 1977.

"Unspoken Dailies", is a 66-minute feature film, showing actor Diego Luna reading the film's script written by García Torres for the first time while being filmed in an artist studio in Mexico City. Alan Smithee, the pseudonym directors used to disown projects they were dissatisfied with, is personified in "I am not a Flopper". The work is a monologue which García Torres co-wrote with philosopher Aaron Schuster, and is an effort to discuss created and invented concepts.

In "R.R. and the Expansion of the Tropics" Garcia Torres created what he calls a "museographic essay"; a narrative of the last three decades in South Florida, combining elements on social issues in the area, climate change, and Robert Rauschenberg. A similar work was his contribution to the 2014 Berlin Biennial, for which he displayed a large number of elements in an underground room at the Ethnologistches Museum surrounding the work and legacy of musician Conlon Nancarrow. “Sounds Like Isolation to Me” also included a collaboration with Berlin pianist Nils Frahm.

List of exhibitions and collections

García Torres has exhibited his work in several museums and biennales around the world, both in solo and collective exhibitions.