Arts & Entertainment

Mexican artist employs pop icons in exhibit on global social crisis

Guadalajara, Mexico, Feb 10 (EFE).- Mexican artist Karla Betancourt explores the world’s contemporary economic and emotional crisis in her new HIPER exhibition, a public display featuring pop icons and large-format works that opened this week at the main cultural complex of the University of Guadalajara (UdeG).

The exhibit consists of 30 multidisciplinary pieces – paintings, graphic works, sculptures and video installations – that employ Neo Pop Art technique and abundant color.

The goal, Betancourt told Efe, is to enable viewers to perceive these works as part of their social context.

“These are elements familiar to anyone. What type of messages are we sending when someone says, ‘Be mine,’ which seems harmless but that people use in relationships? And we’re seeing femicides (gender-related killings), disappearances of women and men who rape because they think women belong to them,” Betancourt said.

A painting of a heart-shaped lollipop with the message “U R Mine,” a large-format photo of a jar filled with used condoms, a collage of multiple Daisy Duck images and metal containers simulating Andy Warhol’s soup cans are some of the pieces that make up the exhibit.

The 28-year-old native of Guadalajara uses elements of marketing and mass production, key sources of inspiration for the Pop Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, to demonstrate the enormous influence of the economy and advertising on human beings.

The pieces serve as a critique of the excessive sexualization, consumerism and marketing in today’s world, according to Betancourt, who says those phenomena have triggered environmental, economic and emotional crises.

“We know about the problems of anxiety and depression that are occurring in society in recent years and which go hand-in-hand with the growth in technologies, which are triggering social problems,” the artist said.

The exhibit was inaugurated on Thursday and will be on display through March 28 at the Jesus Guerrero Galvan gallery, located inside the UdeG’s University Cultural Center. EFE

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