Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/749295
294 culturedmag.com new vision," says Cortina. "With this new generation of designers and artists a very interesting movement is developing where you can find all these dialogues and connections not only within Mexican culture but also with international scenarios." In addition to the increased demand for Mexican artists and designers on the international stage, the country's hospitality mavens are also redefining the popular notions of their land's image with a raft of new stateside ventures. Grupo Habita just opened the Hollander and the Robey in Chicago's Wicker Park and are breaking ground on a new hotel in Los Angeles' downtown Arts District around the corner from Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. Top chef Enrique Olvera, whose Mexico City restaurant Pujol just ranked number 25 on The World's 50 Best Restaurants list, spent the past two years expanding his beloved restaurant group to New York with the opening of Cosme, which recently hosted President Obama. "Our main concern was not to be presumptuous, because we knew beforehand that nobody likes it when a foreign individual comes to 'teach' you how to do things," says Olvera. "We just tried to do what we know the best way we can, taking care of every detail." The question is, will all this exposure attract more young creatives like Zucker and friends to stay, or push them further and further away? An interesting case study might be found in Cristóbal Gracia, an ascendant young Mexico City-born artist with a lumberjack beard and build, whose multimedia "Aquatania Part I" exhibition at El Cuarto de Máquinas proved to be one of the highlights of Gallery Weekend. The show precisely examined the contradictions of Acapulco—tourist destination; narco-terror hot zone—and its elisions with Tarzan, whose star Johnny Weissmuller not only shot the last film in the series on location in the seaside resort town but also lived out his final years in the iconic Hotel Los Flamingos. While such deeply considered conceits might be hard to tease out from abroad, Gracia—whose shoulder-scraping earring and trucker hat were never far from a fawning dealer or curator at the Gallery Weekend gala dinner inside the courtyard of the Noguchi-esque Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia—admitted he was currently applying to MFA programs in Los Angeles. "The force of alternative spaces and a new generation of artists that I consider myself part of are doing amazing things. It's the strangeness and contradictions of the city that allow us to do this. But I also could fall into a comfort zone in Mexico, and I don't want this," says Gracia. "I love and at the same time hate Mexico City." These living contradictions—and let's be honest, they're shared by nearly every young artist in New York City—were stunningly illuminated via Jonathan Hernandez's unforgettable display of knives, vacuum hoses, rubber floors, illegally logged lumber, scales, package sealers, a chain saw, walkie talkies and burner cell phones. All sourced from state auctions of assets seized from narcos and mafias, he re-appropriated these items from the criminal black market into the art world black market as sculptures spread throughout, and embedded in the walls of, Kurimanzutto's kunsthalle. In the work, as in Mexico, Hernandez explains, "Fiction is always present." Or as Oscar Wilde, whose name graces a popular street in Polanco, might have put it: En México, la vida imita al arte muchos más que el arte imita a la vida. Nobuyoshi Araki's qARADISE, 2016 PHOTO BY PJ ROUNTREE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND KURIMANZUTTO, CIUDAD DE MÉXICO