Exposición
The Feathers Burning in Flight
Fabian Cháirez
1 February - 29 March 2024
Fabián Cháirez (Chiapas, 1987) is one of the most provocative and controversial visual artists on the Latin American cultural scene. His works are known for their critical nature and for highlighting dissident identities that are not sufficiently recognized in art history.
In his works, the artist presents bodies in non-normative attitudes, expressed as a counterpoint to hegemonic and heteropatriarchal masculinity. Cháirez uses figurative painting to question the institutions and power hierarchies that perpetuate racial and sexual discrimination. At the same time, he strips his subjects of the stigmas they have historically been subjected to. The dreamlike, religious, and jungle landscape is the backdrop for characters who reflect delicacy, sensuality, and vulnerability. In this way, the artist appropriates and redefines an iconography linked to virility to construct eroticized imaginaries where other realities are possible.
Fabian Cháirez
In December 2019, there were major protests following a work by artist Fabián Cháirez that was exhibited at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. As part of the exhibition Emiliano Zapata after Zapata , the artist presented The Revolution , a painting showing the revolutionary leader naked, wearing stiletto heels and a pink charro hat, riding a horse suffering from an erection.
The National Union of Agricultural Workers (UNTA) and the Independent Central of Agricultural and Peasant Workers (CIOAC) could not stand this image of the revolutionary leader and threatened to burn the painting. They physically and verbally attacked a group of queer activists who sought to prevent the work’s removal. Fabián Cháirez received insults and threats from hundreds of people who repudiated him, while hundreds more, also demonstrating at the museum’s doors, supported him.
The case was so widely publicized that it was reported on media outlets on four continents. Finally, in an attempt to stem the protests, the Cultural Secretariat and the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL) partially relented and added a statement expressing the Zapata family’s disagreement.
