Una Obsesión por las Flores
UPCOMING
05.09.2026
29.11.2026
Una Obsesión por las Flores
Ivan Argote
Ivan Argote

Iván Argote (Bogotá, Colombia, 1983) lives and works between Paris and Bogotá. Through sculpture, installation, video, and public intervention, his practice questions official historical narratives, collective memory, and structures of power. His works propose new ways of engaging with public space, exploring how monuments, architecture, and national symbols shape identity and shared experience.

Image:
© Courtesy Studio Iván Argote.

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ASMA
ASMA

ASMA is an artist duo formed by Hanya Beliá (Mexico, 1994) and Matías Armendariz (Ecuador, 1990). Based in Mexico City, their multidisciplinary practice explores transformation, mythology, and liminal states through sculpture, installation, and speculative fiction.

Photo: ASMA, Ciudad de México. Photo by Rodrigo Álvarez, courtesy of PEANA.

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Sophie Barber
Sophie Barber

Sophie Barber (London, United Kingdom, 1996) lives and works in London. Through painting, her practice explores the memory of images and the ways art history is circulated, transformed, and reinterpreted. Her works bring together references to artists, photographs, books, and everyday objects through a deliberately direct pictorial language in which the materiality of the support plays a central role.

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Bianca Bondi
Bianca Bondi

Bianca Bondi (Johannesburg, South Africa, 1986) lives and works in Paris, France. Through installation, sculpture, and the use of organic materials, her practice explores the relationships between transformation, memory, and spirituality, creating environments in which natural processes such as crystallization, oxidation, and evaporation continue to alter the works over time.


© Photo: Guillaume Blot. Courtesy Bianca Bondi

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Sara Cwynar
Sara Cwynar

Sara Cwynar (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1985) lives and works in New York. Through photography, video, installation, and graphic design, her practice investigates how images produce desire, construct value, and shape collective memory. Bringing together her own photographs, archival material, found objects, and advertising strategies, her works examine the relationship between consumption, representation, and contemporary visual culture.

×
Dalton Gata
Dalton Gata

Dalton Gata (Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, 1977) lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Originally trained in fashion design, he develops a multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, drawing, photography, and installation. His work draws from Surrealism, Caribbean culture, fashion, popular culture, personal memory, and experiences of migration. Through portraiture, still life, and symbolic landscapes, Gata challenges conventional models of beauty, gender, and identity, constructing worlds in which bodily transformation, self-expression, vulnerability, and desire coexist with fantastic elements and intimate references.

×
Ileana García Magoda
Ileana García Magoda

Ileana García Magoda (Mexico City, Mexico, 1987) lives and works in Valle de Bravo, Mexico. Through painting, her practice explores the relationships between the body, time, and natural processes, developing working methodologies that privilege attention, rhythm, and the materiality of gesture.

×
Yann Gerstberger
Yann Gerstberger

Yann Gerstberger (Cagnes-sur-Mer, France, 1983) lives and works in Cuixmala. Through textiles, painting, and sculpture, his practice investigates the expressive possibilities of found and recycled materials. Using processes of assemblage, dyeing, and embroidery, he transforms everyday objects into richly textured surfaces where references to craft, abstraction, and popular culture coexist.

×
John Giorno
John Giorno

John Giorno (New York, USA, 1936–2019) was a north american poet, artist, and activist. A pioneering figure in Performance Poetry, he developed an interdisciplinary practice that brought together writing, performance, and activism. Deeply influenced by Tibetan Buddhism, he explored the visual and sonic potential of language, expanding poetry into painting, installation, audio, and performance.

John Giorno at 222 Bowery. 2018. Photo by Marco Anelli.

×
Parker Ito
Parker Ito

Parker Ito (Long Beach, California, USA, 1986) lives and works in Los Angeles. Through painting, sculpture, and installation, his practice examines how images circulate and transform within digital culture. Combining obsolete technologies, industrial processes, and traditional painterly techniques, his works question notions of originality, authorship, and reproduction in the age of the contemporary image.

×
Enrique López Llamas
Enrique López Llamas

Enrique López Llamas (Mexico City, Mexico, 1987) lives and works in Mexico City. Through painting, drawing, and image appropriation, his practice investigates the relationships between art history, contemporary visual culture, and the construction of memory. His works bring together references from different periods and contexts to explore the ways images generate meaning.

Photo: Cortesía del artista y LLANO Galería.

×
Ad Minoliti
Ad Minoliti

Ad Minoliti (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1980) lives and works in Buenos Aires. Their practice uses geometry and color to construct a non-binary speculative fiction that serves as the foundation for different bodies of work. For Minoliti, geometry is a tool through which to represent and investigate the possibility of a nonhuman heterotopia: an alternative universe in which gender theories can be applied to pictorial language, expanding the ways in which we understand and experience the visual world. From this framework, their work engages with modernism, fetish, education, architecture and design, queer feminism, science fiction, and disability studies. Their paintings and installations extend abstraction into space, proposing environments in which human, animal, vegetal, and technological categories remain open to new forms of relation.

×
Jenine Marsh
Jenine Marsh

Jenine Marsh (Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1994) lives and works in Toronto. Through sculpture, drawing, and installation, her practice investigates the materiality of everyday objects and the ways historical, political, and literary narratives shape our understanding of the present. Her works combine processes of material transformation with textual references to explore the tensions between the domestic, the utopian, and the ephemeral.

Courtesy of the artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto

×
Erin Jane Nelson
Erin Jane Nelson

Erin Jane Nelson (Roswell, Georgia, USA, 1989) is an American artist who lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. Working across photography, ceramics, and sculpture, her practice investigates the relationships between the body, landscape, and ecological systems, combining photographic imagery with sculptural and handcrafted processes.

×
Alberto Perera
Alberto Perera

Alberto Perera (Barcelona, Spain, 1980) lives and works in Mexico City. Through drawing, ceramics, video and performance, his practice explores vulnerability and the grotesque through humour, absurdity, and a deliberately kitsch aesthetic. His work intertwines references to art history and popular imagery, crafting worlds in which the boundaries between reality and fiction remain deliberately unstable.

Created especially for An Obsession with Flowers, the work is conceived as a series of vignettes that together form a wallpaper. The illustrations draw on scenes and characters from the works of Marcel Proust and Mario Bellatin that frame the exhibition, which Perera fragments and reimagines by incorporating figures from other visual imaginaries alongside characters of his own invention. Flowers move through the different scenes not simply as ornamental elements, but as agents within the narrative: they become hiding places, objects of desire, vehicles of escape, or disproportionate presences. Repeated across the wall, the illustrations form a continuous landscape in which literary references are transformed through unexpected, irreverent, and absurd associations.

×
Tourmaline
Tourmaline

Tourmaline (Rochester, New York, USA, 1983) (Rochester, Nueva York, Estados Unidos, 1983) es una artista, cineasta, escritora y activista estadounidense que vive y trabaja en Nueva York. A través del cine, la fotografía y la escritura, su práctica recupera historias de comunidades afroamericanas y trans, imaginando nuevas formas de memoria, placer y liberación.

×
Kapwani Kiwanga
Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga (Hamilton, Ontario, Canadá, 1978) es una artista franco-canadiense que vive y trabaja en París. A través de la escultura, la instalación, el video y la investigación histórica, su práctica examina las estructuras de poder, los legados del colonialismo y los sistemas mediante los cuales el conocimiento es construido, preservado y transmitido.

Photo: Angela Scamarcio

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Ivan Argote
ASMA
Sophie Barber
Bianca Bondi
Sara Cwynar
Dalton Gata
Ileana García Magoda
Yann Gerstberger
John Giorno
Parker Ito
Enrique López Llamas
Ad Minoliti
Jenine Marsh
Erin Jane Nelson
Alberto Perera
Tourmaline
Kapwani Kiwanga
05.09.2026
29.11.2026
Curated by
Anaïs Lepage
20 septiembre 2024 → 15 enero 2024
Martes - Sábado / 11:00 - 17:30 h
planea tu visita

An Obsession with Flowers brings together Marcel Proust, Mario Bellatin, and seventeen international artists around a shared fascination: flowers.

The exhibition imagines a fictional dialogue between two writers, Marcel Proust and Mario Bellatin, sparked by their shared fascination with flowers. One is an icon of twentieth-century French literature; the other, a cult figure of contemporary Peruvian-Mexican literature.

In In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927), Proust unfolds a mental landscape in which flowers stand for aristocratic families, feminine figures, or acts of love consummated in secret: the flower fixes time, desire, memory. In Flowers (2001), Bellatin composes a still life in which each fragment of the narrative, devoted to the troubled fates of eccentric characters, is paired with a specific flower. It becomes an instrument for the deconstruction of norms and transformation of bodies. For both writers, the flower is a symbol, a code of multiple meanings woven into the very fabric of their novels: beneath a frivolous appearance, it embodies dissidence, social satire, nostalgia, and eroticism.

To explore this ambivalence of the floral motif, the exhibition brings together seventeen international artists united by this same obsession. Through conceptual strategies, they create paintings, wallpapers, ceramics, photographs, sculptures, videos, and installations with an ornamental appearance. As for Proust and Bellatin, the flower is for them an ambiguous sign, a double-edged delicacy that oscillates between the beautiful and the political: through it, they subvert the very idea of decor and the decorative. 

The flower symbolizes depending on the context: a critique of colonial systems of exploitation and domination; a reflection on mimetic desire and digital images; an attempt to queer the world, love, and its representations; a reinterpretation of the classical vanitas to convey a contemporary melancholy; a talisman, protection, and invocation. And, in a play of affinities, references, and citations, all of this at once.

An Obsession with Flowers is a defense of beauty, strangeness, and ambiguity as forms of resistance and transgression, in an era marked by the simplification of narratives. In doing so, it celebrates obsession as a creative process, and literature as inspiration.


This exhibition is one of the flagship projects of the Gran Fiesta franco-mexicana, and benefits from the generous support of the Institut Français d'Amérique Latine, the French Embassy in Mexico, and the Circle of Patrons. The Circle of Patrons is led by Safran Mexico and brings together Accor, Airbus, Axa Foundation for Human Progress, BNP Paribas, Engie, FIVES, L'Oréal, Sanofi, Sephora, and Total Energies.

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Artists
Ivan Argote
Ivan Argote

Iván Argote (Bogotá, Colombia, 1983) lives and works between Paris and Bogotá. Through sculpture, installation, video, and public intervention, his practice questions official historical narratives, collective memory, and structures of power. His works propose new ways of engaging with public space, exploring how monuments, architecture, and national symbols shape identity and shared experience.

Image:
© Courtesy Studio Iván Argote.

×
ASMA
ASMA

ASMA is an artist duo formed by Hanya Beliá (Mexico, 1994) and Matías Armendariz (Ecuador, 1990). Based in Mexico City, their multidisciplinary practice explores transformation, mythology, and liminal states through sculpture, installation, and speculative fiction.

Photo: ASMA, Ciudad de México. Photo by Rodrigo Álvarez, courtesy of PEANA.

×
Sophie Barber
Sophie Barber

Sophie Barber (London, United Kingdom, 1996) lives and works in London. Through painting, her practice explores the memory of images and the ways art history is circulated, transformed, and reinterpreted. Her works bring together references to artists, photographs, books, and everyday objects through a deliberately direct pictorial language in which the materiality of the support plays a central role.

×
Bianca Bondi
Bianca Bondi

Bianca Bondi (Johannesburg, South Africa, 1986) lives and works in Paris, France. Through installation, sculpture, and the use of organic materials, her practice explores the relationships between transformation, memory, and spirituality, creating environments in which natural processes such as crystallization, oxidation, and evaporation continue to alter the works over time.


© Photo: Guillaume Blot. Courtesy Bianca Bondi

×
Sara Cwynar
Sara Cwynar

Sara Cwynar (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1985) lives and works in New York. Through photography, video, installation, and graphic design, her practice investigates how images produce desire, construct value, and shape collective memory. Bringing together her own photographs, archival material, found objects, and advertising strategies, her works examine the relationship between consumption, representation, and contemporary visual culture.

×
Dalton Gata
Dalton Gata

Dalton Gata (Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, 1977) lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Originally trained in fashion design, he develops a multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, drawing, photography, and installation. His work draws from Surrealism, Caribbean culture, fashion, popular culture, personal memory, and experiences of migration. Through portraiture, still life, and symbolic landscapes, Gata challenges conventional models of beauty, gender, and identity, constructing worlds in which bodily transformation, self-expression, vulnerability, and desire coexist with fantastic elements and intimate references.

×
Ileana García Magoda
Ileana García Magoda

Ileana García Magoda (Mexico City, Mexico, 1987) lives and works in Valle de Bravo, Mexico. Through painting, her practice explores the relationships between the body, time, and natural processes, developing working methodologies that privilege attention, rhythm, and the materiality of gesture.

×
Yann Gerstberger
Yann Gerstberger

Yann Gerstberger (Cagnes-sur-Mer, France, 1983) lives and works in Cuixmala. Through textiles, painting, and sculpture, his practice investigates the expressive possibilities of found and recycled materials. Using processes of assemblage, dyeing, and embroidery, he transforms everyday objects into richly textured surfaces where references to craft, abstraction, and popular culture coexist.

×
John Giorno
John Giorno

John Giorno (New York, USA, 1936–2019) was a north american poet, artist, and activist. A pioneering figure in Performance Poetry, he developed an interdisciplinary practice that brought together writing, performance, and activism. Deeply influenced by Tibetan Buddhism, he explored the visual and sonic potential of language, expanding poetry into painting, installation, audio, and performance.

John Giorno at 222 Bowery. 2018. Photo by Marco Anelli.

×
Parker Ito
Parker Ito

Parker Ito (Long Beach, California, USA, 1986) lives and works in Los Angeles. Through painting, sculpture, and installation, his practice examines how images circulate and transform within digital culture. Combining obsolete technologies, industrial processes, and traditional painterly techniques, his works question notions of originality, authorship, and reproduction in the age of the contemporary image.

×
Enrique López Llamas
Enrique López Llamas

Enrique López Llamas (Mexico City, Mexico, 1987) lives and works in Mexico City. Through painting, drawing, and image appropriation, his practice investigates the relationships between art history, contemporary visual culture, and the construction of memory. His works bring together references from different periods and contexts to explore the ways images generate meaning.

Photo: Cortesía del artista y LLANO Galería.

×
Ad Minoliti
Ad Minoliti

Ad Minoliti (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1980) lives and works in Buenos Aires. Their practice uses geometry and color to construct a non-binary speculative fiction that serves as the foundation for different bodies of work. For Minoliti, geometry is a tool through which to represent and investigate the possibility of a nonhuman heterotopia: an alternative universe in which gender theories can be applied to pictorial language, expanding the ways in which we understand and experience the visual world. From this framework, their work engages with modernism, fetish, education, architecture and design, queer feminism, science fiction, and disability studies. Their paintings and installations extend abstraction into space, proposing environments in which human, animal, vegetal, and technological categories remain open to new forms of relation.

×
Jenine Marsh
Jenine Marsh

Jenine Marsh (Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1994) lives and works in Toronto. Through sculpture, drawing, and installation, her practice investigates the materiality of everyday objects and the ways historical, political, and literary narratives shape our understanding of the present. Her works combine processes of material transformation with textual references to explore the tensions between the domestic, the utopian, and the ephemeral.

Courtesy of the artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto

×
Erin Jane Nelson
Erin Jane Nelson

Erin Jane Nelson (Roswell, Georgia, USA, 1989) is an American artist who lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. Working across photography, ceramics, and sculpture, her practice investigates the relationships between the body, landscape, and ecological systems, combining photographic imagery with sculptural and handcrafted processes.

×
Alberto Perera
Alberto Perera

Alberto Perera (Barcelona, Spain, 1980) lives and works in Mexico City. Through drawing, ceramics, video and performance, his practice explores vulnerability and the grotesque through humour, absurdity, and a deliberately kitsch aesthetic. His work intertwines references to art history and popular imagery, crafting worlds in which the boundaries between reality and fiction remain deliberately unstable.

Created especially for An Obsession with Flowers, the work is conceived as a series of vignettes that together form a wallpaper. The illustrations draw on scenes and characters from the works of Marcel Proust and Mario Bellatin that frame the exhibition, which Perera fragments and reimagines by incorporating figures from other visual imaginaries alongside characters of his own invention. Flowers move through the different scenes not simply as ornamental elements, but as agents within the narrative: they become hiding places, objects of desire, vehicles of escape, or disproportionate presences. Repeated across the wall, the illustrations form a continuous landscape in which literary references are transformed through unexpected, irreverent, and absurd associations.

×
Tourmaline
Tourmaline

Tourmaline (Rochester, New York, USA, 1983) (Rochester, Nueva York, Estados Unidos, 1983) es una artista, cineasta, escritora y activista estadounidense que vive y trabaja en Nueva York. A través del cine, la fotografía y la escritura, su práctica recupera historias de comunidades afroamericanas y trans, imaginando nuevas formas de memoria, placer y liberación.

×
Kapwani Kiwanga
Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga (Hamilton, Ontario, Canadá, 1978) es una artista franco-canadiense que vive y trabaja en París. A través de la escultura, la instalación, el video y la investigación histórica, su práctica examina las estructuras de poder, los legados del colonialismo y los sistemas mediante los cuales el conocimiento es construido, preservado y transmitido.

Photo: Angela Scamarcio

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Works
View all the works
1
ASMA
Flor Bucle I, 2023

Lost wax bronze cast

28 3/4 x 17 3/8 x 5 7/8 in

1
ASMA
Flor Bucle II, 2023

Lost wax bronze cast

28 3/4 x 21 1/4 x 8 5/8 in

1
ASMA
Flor Bucle III, 2023

Lost wax bronze cast

30 1/4 x 17 3/4 x 7 7/8 in

1
Bianca Bondi
The Ante chamber (Myths of descent and return), 2026

Bed with pillows and sheeting, saline pond, artificial vegetation, natural vegetation, coins, chest of drawers, circular mirror, glass, swan vase, rusted arrows, copper amphora and salt

1
Sophie Barber
In Derek's Garden Dungeness, 2023

Oil on canvas

11 3/4 x 16 7/8 x 4 1/2 in

1
Sophie Barber
Flowers from Renoir to Franz, 2025

Oil on Canvas

13 x 18 7/8 in

1
Enrique López Llamas
La maldita primavera (Enrique Guzmán), 2023

Antidepressants, anxiolytics, antipsychotics, analgesics and acrylic on MDF cutout

45 5/8 x 41 3/8 x 3/4 in

1
Enrique López Llamas
La maldita primavera (Henri Matisse 2), 2023

Antidepressants, anxiolytics, antipsychotics, analgesics and acrylic on MDF cutout

45 5/8 x 35 3/8 x 3/4 in

1
Enrique López Llamas
La maldita primavera (Henri Matisse 3), 2023

Antidepressants, anxiolytics, antipsychotics, analgesics and acrylic on MDF cutout

45 5/8 x 39 3/8 x 12 5/8 in

1
Enrique López Llamas
La maldita primavera (Irises, Van Gogh), 2023

Antidepressants, anxiolytics, antipsychotics, analgesics and acrylic on MDF cutout

31 1/8 x 47 1/4 x 3/4 in

1
Parker Ito
Good Luck Charm, 2020

Oil on linen

80 x 60 in

1
Parker Ito
Orchid clip, 2020

White bronze, jewelry chain

80 x 60 in

1
Parker Ito
Oscar/Hoolbox, 2020

Oil on linen

80 x 60 in

1
Sara Cwynar
Flower on TV Screen, 2023

Archival pigment print

29 7/8 x 23 5/8 in

1
Sara Cwynar
Glass Life, Green, 2021

Archival pigment print on Dibond

40 x 32 in

1
Sara Cwynar
Sara Cwynar Peony I, 2022

Archival pigment print

52 x 43 3/4 x 1 1/8 in

1
Sara Cwynar
Rose Gold, 2017

16 mm film transferred to video

8 min

1
Sara Cwynar
Wallpapers, 2017

1
Erin Jane Nelson
Pseudofloraldetonator, 2023

Pigment prints, sequins, lichen, copper, latex, embroidered patch, and bio-based resin on glazed stoneware

40 x 34 x 5 in

1
Tourmaline
It's giving Countach, 2022

Digital C-print

Unframed: 10 x 10 in - 25.4 x 25.4 cm Framed: 20 3/4 x 20 3/4 in - 52.7 x 52.7 cm

1
Tourmaline
Silver Cloud I, 2022

Gelatin silver print

Unframed: 10 x 10 in - 25.4 x 25.4 cm Framed: 20 3/4 x 20 3/4 in - 52.7 x 52.7 cm

1
Tourmaline
Silver Wraith, 2022

Gelatin silver print

Unframed: 10 x 10 in - 25.4 x 25.4 cm Framed: 20 3/4 x 20 3/4 in - 52.7 x 52.7 cm

1
Tourmaline
Sweptail, 2022

Gelatin silver print

10 x 10 in - 25.4