< Artists
Jorge Méndez Blake
"My work is a meditation of the possibilities and results of connecting architecture, classic literature and culture. My point of departure is always literature, authors and fiction, mainly classic easily recognizable authors. From there I search for gaps or stories that are not completed or related with each other and use different media to make comments around them. My interest is to connect distant topics, objects and situations that you wouldn’t be supposed to see connected and find new meanings and exits around them."

Jorge Méndez Blake (°1974, Mexico) uses literature as a conceptual tool. His work explores the potential connections between literature, architecture and culture in general. He creates associations between these different disciplines to question history and the notion of fiction. Formally, his works oscillate between minimalist radicality and symbolic actions, such as the action undertaken in New York in 2012 when he lent in one day all the books of Jorge Luis Borges from the Manhattan libraries to deposit them on Meessen De Clercq’s booth at Frieze New York.

Jorge Méndez Blake had solo exhibitions at Marfa contemporary, Marfa, at the MCA Denver and the Museum of Latin American Art in Los Angeles (USA), the MUAC and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (Mexico) at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce in Genova (Italy), Kunsthalle Mulhouse (France). He created a site-specific work for the Bass museum, Miami in 2022 as well as for the Palm Springs Museum in 2023. Solo exhibitions are planned in Museo Cabaña, Guadalajara (Mexico, 2023), MARCO, Monterrey (Mexico, 2024) and Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo (USA, 2025).

Works

Das Kapital
Jorge Méndez Blake
Bookshelf Structure I
Jorge Méndez Blake
All the Borges Books
Jorge Méndez Blake
Two Walls
Jorge Méndez Blake
From an Unfinished Work (Stephen Hero)
Jorge Méndez Blake
Il pleut fort
Jorge Méndez Blake
It's Raining (An Anthology)
Jorge Méndez Blake
All Writing Begins in a Jungle X
Jorge Méndez Blake
I Will Defend Poetry (Poems on Ruins) V
Jorge Méndez Blake

Gallery exhibitions

Exhibitions

A Message from the Emperor
Marfa Contemporary, Marfa (USA)
2018
Projets pour une Possible Littérature
La Kunsthalle, Mulhouse (France)
2015
Resisting the present
Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (France)
2012
I Remember an Exhibition
Palm Springs Museum, Palm Springs (USA)
2024
Paisaje desmantelado (Haikus de José Juan Tablada) / Dismantled Landscape (José Juan Tablada’s Haikus)
The Bass Museum, Miaim (USA)
2024

Projects

Absences, mues et macules
Ignasi Aballí, Léa Belooussovitch, Marc Buchy, Lieven De Boeck, Hreinn Friðfinnsson, Ellen Harvey, Rinko Kawauchi, Nicolás Lamas, Benoît Maire, mountaincutters, Cornelia Parker, Claudio Parmiggiani, Benoit Platéus, Jorge Méndez Blake, Christopher Orr, Evariste Richer, Solène Rigou, José María Sicilia, Namsal Siedlecki, Thu Van Tran, Chaim van Luit, Xie Lei
Une saison en Enfer
Ignasi Aballí, Jorge Méndez Blake, Jordi Colomer, Nicolás Lamas, Thu Van Tran, Chaim van Luit, Delphine Coindet