Mexico's New Wave.(modern art)(Critical Essay)

Back in the early 1990s, Mexico City artist Eduardo Abaroa was hardly an international name. He showed his abstract sculptures--made from everyday objects like metal, cotton swabs and mirrors--in borrowed houses and sold them to friends. His work, like that of many other young Mexican artists, was often overlooked by the country's state-run museums. "Contemporary art had no space back then," says the reserved 34-year-old. Now, almost a decade later, Abaroa's life could not be more different. He lives in a spacious apartment-cum-studio in one of Mexico City's hippest neighborhoods and flies around the world visiting galleries where his art is on display. His pieces are selling faster than ever before, for around $3,000 apiece. "I used to be very angry with people who saw art as a career," says Abaroa. "But then I said, 'Well, what are you going to do? This is how it is'."

After decades on the periphery, the Mexican contemporary art scene is finally establishing itself on the international art circuit. Thanks to a surge in popularity from four major Mexican exhibits in the past year--in New York, London, Berlin and San Diego--it's now difficult to find a major metropolis that doesn't have at least one established gallery mounting new Mexican art. Early next year, Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art will attempt to outdo the recent big shows with its survey, "Made in Mexico." The movement has reached "critical mass," says Betti-Sue Hertz, who curated the recent San Diego Museum of Art show "Axis Mexico: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions." The combined effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the end of the Institutional Revolutionary Party's 71-year stranglehold on power and the influx of private money into the fine arts are giving Mexico's contemporary artists newfound creative and financial freedom. They have finally begun to emerge from the shadows of great Mexican modernists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

The new wave of Mexican artists work in an eclectic mix of styles, themes and media. Yoshua Okon and Miguel Calderon have made names for themselves by staging and videotaping car thefts--effectively mocking the capital's ineffectual police force. Monica Castillo's video "Dancer's Self-Portrait" follows the choreographed movements of a painted ballerina. Domingo Nuno's manipulated computer images in the series "Shanghaied Acrobatics" reveal his childhood love of Mexican comic books and newfound interest in Japanese anime. Teresa Margolles's installation "Tongue" features a --real one, severed from a dead teenage drug addict. Alex Hank prefers his tongue in cheek, producing "Crime," a huge glitzy sign that he says has no particular social message. Others have turned a critical lens on the country's huge class divides; in her glossy, wildly colorful photos, Daniela Rossell captures members of her own social class--the ultrarich--in all their tacky glory.

It may not suit everyone, but Mexico's new art clearly has youthful energy. Whether socially conscious or simply esthetically intriguing, these works manage to be both patriotic and global-minded. Even depressing photos of harsh Mexican life carry a thrilling unpredictability, reflecting a country teeming with cultures, colors ...