Aquel Amplex

The Instituto Cervantes in New York is pleased to present Aquel Amplex, the first institutional exhibition of work by Venezuelan artist Cassandra Mayela Allen, curated by Fabiola R. Delgado and Carlos Núñez.

The Instituto Cervantes in New York is pleased to present Aquel Amplex, the first institutional exhibition of work by Venezuelan artist Cassandra Mayela Allen, curated by Fabiola R. Delgado and Carlos Núñez. In Aquel Amplex, Cassandra Mayela Allen steps back to examine her process-driven textile practice within the legacies of Venezuelan and Latin American modernism and informalism, interrogating the circumstances of her self-taught approach. Amassing two years of communally woven braids, Aquel Amplex evolves in a spatial and personal exploration that casts, in its collective materiality, an infinite outward net. The exhibition stretches across the Instituto Cervantes with a central braided structure, investigatory wall pieces, a garden installation, and a collaborative work commissioned by the Instituto Cervantes, which will be woven in situ over the course of the exhibition and remain in the center’s permanent collection thereafter. Aquel Amplex—“that embrace”—derives from a 1969 letter written by Hélio Oiticica to Lygia Clark, when both Brazilian artists lived in exile. The phrase bears a protest longing to create from the distance of forced migration. For Mayela Allen, it becomes a means to activate her inherently collaborative work to deconstruct her national and artistic heritage, with the embrace as genesis for a new narrative of Venezuela. Paintings and drawings explore the enduring modernism that reached Venezuela in the 1950s and 1960s under a right-wing dictatorship, importing from the United States and Europe forms and ideals disconnected from local social realities. Braided sculptures respond from a Latin American lineage of disruptive, corporeal experimentation. Here, Mayela Allen expands her textile practice from the artisanal to the architectural, fracturing space and the façade of a modernist Venezuela, and materially reshaping their conception. Braiding gatherings transform a set of flags from the Instituto Cervantes into a new work of union, seeking not a utopian “activation,” but a welcoming into the artist’s way of existing: inhabiting the constant political acts of conversation, memory, community, and reinvention. With Aquel Amplex, the Instituto Cervantes inaugurates its initiative Spring at Amster Yard, an annual exhibition dedicated to an emerging New York-based artist. Aquel Amplex will also feature a catalogue with essays by Fabiola R. Delgado, Carlos Núñez, Alexander Chaparro, and Jesús Torrivilla. The publication will be presented on May 23 at the Instituto Cervantes.

What to expect:
Painting, Installation