Milena Muzquiz

The visual language that Milena Muzquiz uses in her work is fueled by the dramatic social and political metamorphoses of the border, which she assumes with a childlike urgency to visualize the world as a place of joy. Muzquiz is interested in the intersections between nature, movement, and transition. She uses motifs from popular visual culture and especially tourism icons as the main objects of her work.

Baby rock is a tribute to the Tijuana landscape, the metamorphoses, and the Pacific Ocean, which is obstructed by a wall that divides the two worlds in which the artist negotiates her existence.

Milena Muzquiz’ (b. 1972) works provide a direct encounter with her wit and her engagement with personal narratives and memories. Her paintings of women surrounded, if not enveloped, by flower blossoms, are recollections of memories of places, oozing with nostalgia. Viewers are invited to share her reminiscences of a semi- imaginary world, recalling her Tijuana birthplace and childhood vacations. The artist’s images and motifs feel familiar, rendered in expressionist brushstrokes.

Muzquiz’s ceramics are functioning vases, tactile and meant to be handled. In a process of cutting and scoring her clay, applying it to the vessel like paper or ‘magazine cut-outs’ then layering colors, patterns, images, tendrils, baubles and pendants, she creates complex self-portraits, so full of movement, they’re almost performative. ‘My ceramics are not so far from my performance art,’ agrees Muzquiz, whose international reputation was established as one half of the art band Los Super Elegantes, performing for 15 years with Martiniano López Crozet.