Eduardo Sarabia is a Mexican-American artist who uses his practice as a way to explore his dual identity. Born in Los Angeles to Mexican immigrants, but now based in Guadalajara, Sarabia is known for creating distorted figurative paintings — often depicting family, friends and personal experiences — with splotchy hits of oil paint, as a way to blur the lines between fact and fiction.
On view at Mexico City’s Galeria OMR, Sarabia presents Four Minutes of Darkness, a new solo exhibition centered around a solar eclipse. As his first show with the gallery and the second exhibition in this eclipse-related series, Sarabia mixes personal histories with mystical and alchemical narratives, by inviting audiences to a wall-to-wall mural of a garden that winds around the space like a vine encapsulating a house. Framed around the idea of a chapel, Sarabia’s cathedral of sorts is layered with different symbolic references to his childhood, from he and his grandfather’s love for baseball, as well as allusions to Mexico’s indigenous histories.
Housed on the second floor of the gallery, Sarabia’s ceramic vessels take center stage, where the artist replaces the usual talavera motifs in Mexican pottery with images of guns, pin-up girls and narcotics, as way to comment on the fraught and complicated relationship between the US and Mexico and the micro-economies that persist through it all. The title of the show takes its name from the forthcoming total eclipse that will transition the day into night for four minutes on April 8, 2024. The eclipse will pass over North America and will be the last total eclipse over the US until 2044. For those in the area, there will be a public viewing at the stadium of the Los Venados during the eclipse.
Four Minutes of Darkness is on view in CDMX until April 13.
OMR
Córdoba 100, Roma Nte.,
Cuauhtémoc, 06700 Ciudad de México, CDMX, Mexico
