Where Aesthetics Meet Biology, Politics, and Social Sciences
Interview with visual artist Erick Meyenberg
Tell us what you do and your beginnings.
I’m a visual artist born and raised in Mexico City (1980). I did a bachelor's degree in Visual Arts at the National School of Arts (UNAM) and then a master's degree at the University of the Arts, Berlin (Universität der Künste Berlin) under the mentorship of German artist Rebecca Horn.
This experience in Berlin was a crucial departing point for my artistic research, it was the time when I truly started doing interdisciplinary projects: mixing not only media but also different subjects and interests from diverse sources of information and working with collaborators from various fields.
Since childhood, art has been a space where I explore my desires, dreams, and research about life; I can mix all my interests: Biology, Ecology, History, Literature, Politics, Social sciences, and Aesthetics.
What does your work aim to say?
I wouldn’t say there’s a sole message that I would like to convey with my art since it is always shifting, but there’s a constant pursuit of looking for a universal language through the conceptual and aesthetic experiences that my works present.
I always seek to address primal emotions, shared by us all as humans, regardless of nationalities or passports, trying to use the power and strength of an aesthetic experience to affect first the body and emotions of a spectator, to convey the messages of the artworks more strongly and deeply.
I believe that the affective force of art is one of its most profound, powerful, and even subversive qualities. Finding that force and communicating it through, video, sound, space, objects or colors is one of my main goals.
Where do you find inspiration for your art?
I find inspiration in life. In the complex, almost invisible connections that bring living forces together in the same geopolitical or temporal space. Finding meanings and connections that I never expected to encounter, fascinates me and result in a very inspiring impulse to do an art project.
I find inspiration while creating and achieving a truly aesthetic experience with my working subjects, sometimes a group of people, sometimes Nature itself…
Could you give us some insight into your creative process?
Everything starts with an intuition. When I feel profoundly attracted to a subject found in my life encounters, I document it; without really knowing or thinking that it will develop into an art project.
When my subconscious and desire start tracing connective lines, through dreams or even serendipitous encounters with ideas, books, images, and life… it’s the moment when I feel a project is starting. What I intend to do is try not to analyze too much during this primal state, to create unexpected and surprising constellations around my desires, art History, and culture.
Once an aesthetic universe is created I try to look for a form, a media to give shape to those concepts, feelings, perceptions, and first impressions… normally, this process flows naturally and fluently together with the ideas and the constellations that give birth to them.
The last stage is about understanding or at least, trying to understand what the unexpected has created, to find concepts that are pulled out from this process and never beforehand, never a priori, and look for a way to convey in words what uncontrollably happened during this process. I think this is one of the most appealing, exciting, and powerful features in art making: that one always works with the uncertain, and it always has something interesting to say about life itself.
What are your future projects?
I’m preparing two different solo shows in Mexico City for 2025. One at the gallery Lourdes Sosa represents me. A show entitled “Ithaka” mainly with new ceramic sculptures, as a continuity of some ideas around nostalgia after my current project representing my country in the Mexican Pavilion at the 60th. Venice Art Biennial 2024.
The second one has been a long-term research project, 5 years already, around the internationally renowned Mexican architect Luis Barragán (Pritzker Prize 1980). The multimedia project, focusing on the housekeeper of the home he built for himself -Casa Barragán, gravitates around the notion of Botany and aesthetics as a means to preserve memory.
Interview by Fabio Pariante, X • Instagram • Website