Mathias Goeritz’s documental archive safeguarded by Museo Cabañas counts with a great amount of letters that Goeritz exchanged with artists and art agents around the world; among them stand out those sent by Pedro Friedeberg, due to their content and their plastic attributes. This exhibit intends to gather all the letters in our archive to closely follow a three-decade-long conversation presenting a clever, fun vision of the Mexican artworld. La nefasta hinfluencia, aún [The Nefarious Hinfluence, still] is made up of over 40 letters, invitations, posters, and photographs.
Mathias Goeritz Brunner was a German architect, considered one of the vanguardist figures of our country’s 20th Century art. He made a foray into painting, graphics, and sculpture, as well as into poetry. Goeritz’s work arrived at Museo Cabañas in 1994, and the collection —the most extensive of this creator— consists of 240 pieces among sculpture, painting, drawing, and serigraphy. Besides Goeritz’s personal archive, with a set of almost a thousand letters exchanged with artists, those sent by Pedro Friedeberg are the letters we can find in La nefasta hinfluencia, aún.Pedro Friedeberg was born in Florence, Italy, on January 11th, 1937. He lived in Mexico since he was a child. His mother, of Jewish and German origin, seeked shelter during the Second World War, and arrived in our country. He studied in Boston, and in 1957 he entered the Universidad Iberoamericana [Ibero-American University] to study Architecture, where he met Mathias Goeritz. Time after, Pedro dropped out, and changed his studies to Plastic Arts, in the same University. Influenced by Goeritz, Pedro created architectural models that mixed different elements and structures. In 1961, Friedeberg joined the group called Los Hartos —hence the letter H in the word “influence” in the exposition’s title—. They defined themselves as dissidents of art with social and political contents, dominating Mexican plastics of the time. They stated they were tired of everything being limited to Muralism and nationalist and rural topics. Friedeberg is currently 85 years old, and is a prominent figure within Mexican art.