Adriana Martínez Barón at Embajada

Artist: Adriana Martínez Barón

Exhibition title: [pʀɛtapɔʀte]

Venue: Embajada, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Date: August 28 – October 30, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Embajada, San Juan

Embajada is pleased to present [pʀɛtapɔʀte], an exhibition bringing together all the wearable collections from artist Adriana Martínez Barón’s various collaborative artwork-clothing projects since 2018. Martínez Barón’s conceptual practice addresses and critiques global economic and commercial influences on local culture, with a focus on South America. In 2018 Martínez Barón together with cultural manager Juliana Echavarría launched MALL, a project dedicated to “wearables” by contemporary artists as a means of questioning the relationship between art and consumption in the “post-normcore” era. In this vein, Martínez Barón’s collaborative collections work with everyday and readymade clothing, pulling from pop culture, mass marketing, and our image-rich global culture to comment on the recent proliferation of mass-produced commodities throughout Latin America.

“Prêt-à-porter” (ready-to-wear) is an expression of French origin applied to garments or clothing collections that are mass-produced, and although the qualitative element is not necessarily lost, it has an echo in popular culture, the demand for market and trends. Adriana Martinez is today ADRIANA MARTINEZ BARÓN (#adrianamartinezbaron). Creating a brand comes from the possibility of rebranding your own name. Emphasizing this change and forgetting the possible pragmatic consequences of this fact, consists of repeating it many times visually and materially until remembering it to give it legitimacy. Adriana Martinez is today ADRIANA MARTINEZ BARÓN (#adrianamartinezbaron).

[Pretaporte] as a new collection-synthesis dissolves professional, ideological, spatial and temporal boundaries from which Adriana Martinez Barón proposes an exhibition exercise as a point of reference for a collaborative process and not an experience of an individual nature. (AMB) is the acrostic and the brand that condenses several projects developed collectively over several years. Adriana Martinez is today ADRIANA MARTINEZ BARÓN (#adrianamartinezbaron). The logos invade the garments as prints or tags that ironize the use of the artist’s signature as inescapable in the validation of art and its context. Merchandising, under the ADRIANA MARTINEZ BARON (#adrianamartinezbaron) brand, preserves the particular visual identities of each of the projects. [ Pretaporte] closes a circle of production time.

Adriana Martinez is today ADRIANA MARTINEZ BARÓN (#adrianamartinezbaron). The use of the ready-made as a semantic derivation of the ready-to-wear suggests that the pieces presented in this collective of collections come from already existing garments such as: those used by the Artist Breakfast Institute – ABI, used in exhibition environments (in the Market art) or in street work situations (Bon Ice workers); this is how wear and tear become the intervention elements of these objects and finally establish the common principle of the collection.

ADRIANA MARTINEZ BARÓN (#adrianamartinezbaron) presents her spring / summer, fall / winter, Resort and Pre-fall collection, establishing a new space for discussion, accessibility and use of ~ art ~ products outside of domestic and institutional structures. It is an opportunity for the exhibition, as a means of representation, to occupy the streets under the dynamics of clothing and consumption. Adriana Martinez is today ADRIANA MARTINEZ BARÓN (#adrianamartinezbaron) presenting and encouraging the possibilities of curatorial practice and appropriation.

–Gerardo Chavez-Maza

Adriana Martínez Barón (b. 1988 in Bogotá, Colombia) studied art at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, where she is currently based, working collaboratively on several projects including her personal practice. As a complement to her artistic practice, Martínez operates the art space MIAMI Prácticas Contemporáneas, a collaborative studio and project space that she founded in Bogotá with artist Juan Peláez in 2011. The artist is also a part of the gallery Carne, which was established in 2014 to represent many of her MIAMI collaborators. She has exhibited extensively in the US and Latin America including “Take me i’m yours” curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jens Hoffmann and Kelly Yaxter, Jewish Museum, New York (2017), “The second tropical biennial” co-curated by Pablo León de la Barra, Stephan Benchoam, Marina Reyes Fanco and Radames Juni Figueroa, San Juan, (2018), “Arte en Colombia en el siglo XXI” curated by Emiliano Valdés, Medellín Museum of Modern Art, Medellín (2019). Her first international solo exhibition took place at MOCAD, Detroit (2017). She is currently included in a solo show at Foro Space in Bogota.