Yvonne Venegas / Zona MACO 2020

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is delighted to return to ZONA MACO in Mexico City. As part of our commitment to presenting important and challenging contemporary art, we will feature a presentation of photography by Yvonne Venegas, one of Mexico's leading contemporary photographers. The artist has curated her own booth, an unusual creative gesture for an art fair, and will be installed as if it is a wall in her nearby Mexico City studio.

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The booth will present close to a dozen images from an evolving series of work, "The pencil of nature," in which the artist explores gender, in particular masculine and feminine subject positions through, primarily, photographic poses. One group of pictures here can be described as gender fluid self-portraits and another group is portraits of women, the artist using professional actresses based in Mexico City to enact or play out different subject positions and poses.

Writing about this series of work, the artist has said:

"In this series I revise female poses when photographed by men, re-visiting the work of photographers that have been important in my practice through the years as well as discovering new ones. Also, I reenact male poses in the form of self-portraits, working from images that have represented important or celebrated men as well as photographers representing themselves. My interpretation of these works intends to question if gender is really a quality conferred to us by nature."

The photographs are linked by an overall exploration of the body in movement and in transition. They are all black and white to signal the way in which the artist is interested in referencing photographic history, as well as social and cultural history, along with her own personal history as an artist -- Venegas started taking photographs with black and white film and is using the same materials she used when she first began in the 1980s.

The artist looks forward to welcoming old friends, clients and new visitors to the booth.