Un Río Abrazando Una Montaña

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present an exhibition of new ceramics and installation works by Mexican artist Alejandro García Contreras. The exhibition, entitled Un río abrazando una montaña, is the artist's first solo exhibition at the gallery. Alejandro García Contreras's creative work is driven by a dialogue between material and technical processes. His experiments are filled with, and at times formed from, symbolic iconography including flaming arrows, swords, serpents, bones, and crystals. The female figures that populate many of the works read as goddesses or angels; they embody a feminine power of dual nature—occult and divine—engulfed in flames, winged, gloriously nude. The exhibition is organized around a central paradox: a river embracing a mountain. This image proposes that which moves surrounds that which is immobile; that which is soft encircles that which is hard; and that which flows adapts to that which remains. In García Contreras's work, embrace and erosion are in a silent negotiation of opposing forces. The mountain imposes its presence, and the river responds with continuity. The vertical, rising forms read as mountains—sites of law, limit, and sacred architecture where the veil between heaven and earth is thinnest. Proliferating molten glazes flow around and reshape immobile peaks, depositing minerals and nurturing mythic creatures. The artist elaborates on this mutual dependence, describing these embraces as more than gesture; "river and mountain, at times, create a landscape of life. It is an act of love, a sensual scene between that which descends and that which resurges, eternal and transcendent. Caressing one another, they meet, forming a single landscape." The tray forms, Las Damas Y El Unicornio And Un Río Abrazando Una Montaña extend the metaphor horizontally, presenting bodies at repose within ecological and mythic landscapes, where figures, animals, and minerals coexist without dissolving into sameness. García Contreras situates eroticism relationally, as a negotiation between difference and continuity. The glass cloche sculpture, titled Maetel, Pasajera De Mi Memoria, encloses a cloaked woman with flowing blonde hair. She stands resolved yet contained, animated by these balanced forces. García Contreras's practice of combining elements results in suggestive forms that explore the divine, the evil, the magical, the erotic and the feminine, as well as various taboo dimensions of the viewer's own unconscious, promoting the discovery of a new sense of divinity through contemporary idols. The mirror work, surrounded by flaming ceramic arrows, implicates the viewer directly—a solar disc intensifying the encounter, a burning effigy of the self. The gallery becomes a matrix of energy flows intensified by suspended flaming arrows directed toward the mirror and hanging from the ceiling. Installed directly on the gallery wall, a spider web made from tiny chain link is embellished with charms and gemstones. The work proposes a micro cosmos of invisible architecture and psychic equilibrium. Through his artistic projects, García Contreras explores topics and themes inspired by contemporary popular culture, folklore, myth, occultism and religion. The artist was raised in Chiapas, Mexico, a region known for its proximity to nature and deep-rooted mystical, indigenous, and esoteric traditions. At a young age, he experimented with magic and the occult. His work explores the unconscious, projecting codes and elements that inhabit it, recalling that art once functioned as the crafting of magical objects representing life and death. The exhibition proposes a world shaped by slow, transformative embrace of difference. Alejandro García Contreras (b. 1982, Tapachula, Chiapas, México) studied Visual Arts at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving ENPEG/La Esmeralda. In 2016, he was invited to the Casa Wabi residency program. The same year, he launched the art residency Dedazo in Carrillo Puerto, Chiapas. In the last years, he exhibited in various countries all around the world and in U.S. based galleries such as Swivel Gallery, Friedman Benda and David Castillo Gallery. In Mexico, he has presented his work in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Ex Colegio de San Ildefonso, the Ex Teresa Museum, the National Center for the Arts, the Chopo University Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey, among others. He also exhibited in galleries such as Proyectos Monclova, Nasal, House of Gaga, Travesia Cuatro, Armada Galería, Guadalajara 9021 etc. In 2024 he presented his first institutional solo show in the US at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY. In 2025, he presented Le monde comme un Labyrinthe, a solo exhibition of new work conceived by the artist to show alongside Boleslaw Biegas and Gustave Moreau, presented at the Polish Institute of Paris, France. García Contreras lives and works in Guadalajara, México.

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