Artist: Shana Sharp
Venue: Lulu, Mexico City
Date: November 24, 2018 – January 26, 2019
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Lulu, Mexico City
In an act of arguably unprecedented narcissism, Lulu is hosting an exhibition all about itself. And yet it is about so much more. It is, bien sûr, a portrait, from multiple perspectives, of Lulu. Its façade, courtyard, bathroom, flora and fauna, so and so forth. But it is also, necessarily, a localized portrait of Mexico City. An enrapt regard of the Roma Sur apartment building in which Lulu is situated; the light, colors, angles, curves, and traces of life of which it is composed. It is a show about painting that not only does not take its context for granted, but makes it the very subject matter of the show. Ostensibly related to institutional critique, by way of, say, William Anastasi’s mise-en-abyme portraits of Virginia Dwan gallery, it has nothing, in point of fact, to do with institutional critique. For it is a homage, a suite of bright pictorial eulogies, retinal odes of joy, to the space and city it finds itself in. It is also the Sonoma-based, self-taught painter Shana Sharp’s (b. 1953) first exhibition. Lulu is very proud to be at once its subject and its host.
