José Montealegre

Mountains is pleased to present Nuevo Mundo, a solo exhibition featuring new work by Florence-based artist José Montealegre.

(...) The plants take their forms and names from Nova Plantarum, an encyclopaedic study on the flora of the new world. Francisco Hernández de Toledo traveled through central Mexico for seven years under the title of Protomédico de Indias Occidentales [Protophysician of the Western Indies] and compiled more than 3000 specimens. He wrote a series of books that are fundamental to the history of exchanges between worlds that also documents Nahua medicine and culture around 1570-77. The copper sculptures adhere to the book's illustrations, which Hernández commissioned from local artists. The titles of the sculptures refer to specific pages in the book, whose original manuscripts were lost in 1671 during a fire in the monastery El Escorial. However, multiple editions based on the book’s albeit reduced, yet surviving second version, abridged by Nardo Antonio Recchi in the early 1580s, continue to circulate. The relationship of the book’s drawings to the originals—or to the reality of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations—has to be understood within the relentless logic of facsimiles, translation and their incongruities.

The artist confronts us first and foremost with the unavoidable distortions inscribed in the documents of muddled histories. The sculptures reproduce the distortions of scale and proportion that would have helped distinguish a stem from a branch, or a tree from a plant. These specimens of pre-Hispanic Mexican flora find a casual escape in their newfound reality as sculptures. The visual loop that exists between Europe and its “Indies”—instantiated by the Nova Plantarum’s concatenation of image and text, as well as Náhuatl and Latin—is challenged by the sculptural translations of the drawings. These multiply the possible iterations indigenous ecologies can find today. The sculptures’ copper stems and leaves seem to have survived the historical fire, while their iridescent green patina, which begins to show with time’s passing, defy it. The resistance inherent to the modelling of the plant’s newfound materiality tints the horizons of history. (...)

—José B. Segebre

José Montealegre (b. 1992, Tegucigalpa, Honduras) graduated in 2019 with a Meisterschüler from Willem de Rooij's class at Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, and is currently based in Florence, Italy.

Among his recent and upcoming solo shows are Colibrí at Convent Art Space in Ghent, BE (2019), and Klosterruine, Berlin, DE (2021).

Group shows include Jahresgaben 2020 at Bonner Kunstverein in Bonn, DE (2020); Tracing Echoes at fffriedrich in Frankfurt, DE (2019); from dusk till dawn at PiK Deutz in Cologne, DE (2019); Wu Du Wu at Natalia Hug Gallery in Cologne, DE (2019); A guiding dog for a blind dog at Futura Gallery, Prague, CZ (2018); Someplace Special at Gillmeier Rech in Berlin, DE (2018); Planet 9 at Kunsthalle Darmstadt in Darmstadt, DE (2017).

José B. Segebre is a writer living in Berlin. He is currently a PhD candidate at HfG Offenbach in Philosophy/Aesthetics: "What are We Waiting For? The Time of Waiting in Queer, Feminist and Decolonial Aesthetics."