The exhibition "Birds of Mexico" offers a dive into the world of Mexican decorative arts through the symbolic motif of the bird that many modern artists are brilliantly reappropriating.
At first glance, there are many similarities between Mexican decorative arts as presented by the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech in the "Birds of Mexico" exhibition and Moroccan craftsmanship. Basketry, jewelry, ceramics: the same know-how is perceptible at first glance. After visiting the Museum of Popular Art in Mexico City, Madison Cox, President of the Majorelle Foundation, became convinced that at the time of the conquest of the Americas by the Spanish, many Arab-Andalusian artisans, enlisted in the crossing, transmitted their ancestral techniques to local cultures of great richness. From this intuition was born the exhibition project entrusted to curator Juan Gerardo Ugalde Salinas, in charge of the restoration and conservation of the collections of the Pierre Bergé Museum of Berber Arts and the Yves Saint Laurent Museum.
A national symbol
"Birds of Mexico" thus gives pride of place to a motif that has become a national emblem – a golden eagle appearing on the Mexican flag –, whose presence is attested in pre-colonial Aztec culture. This is evidenced by several objects in the exhibition, including a clay sculpture representing a human face wearing an eagle-shaped helmet (around 900 AD) or a carved wooden carnival mask that seems to stare at the spectator. The bird, whose diversity on the national territory is shown by a map by contemporary artist Daniela Zorrilla, enters into the composition of ceramics, embroidery, or decorative objects whose ritual and religious function is recalled. "Feathers were also a means of payment like vanilla or cocoa, emphasizes the exhibition curator. For pre-Columbian populations, this had a strong symbolic value." Without taking on an ethnographic dimension, "the initial intention was to propose a transhistorical narrative, showing the importance of birds both in culture and in nature", adds Juan Gerardo Ugalde Salinas.
Modernist reappropriations
But the highlight of the exhibition undoubtedly lies in the presence of modern or contemporary works subjectively reappropriating a centuries-old motif. In the facsimile of Frida Kahlo's diary, the bird becomes the symbol of compensation for a bruised body, while a photograph by artist Flor Garduño, titled Paonne, takes on a strangely totemic dimension, having nothing to envy to the cosmogonic reveries of the Marrakchi painter Abbès Saladi, of whom the abundant universe of birds in freedom often makes one think. This is evidenced by a 1957 graphite on paper, The Creation of Birds, by the Spanish surrealist artist Remedios Varo, exiled in Mexico after the Second World War, whose allegorical dreaminess seems to have universal reach.
Olivier Rachet
Exhibition "Birds of Mexico", Yves Saint Laurent Museum of Marrakech until July 27, 2025.
The article Mexico invites itself to the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech appeared first on Diptyk Magazine.
