Frieda Toranzo Jaeger: A future in the light of darkness
Modern Art Oxford today announces an exhibition of new and recent works by Mexico City-based artist Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (b. 1988). A future in the light of darkness features her signature large-scale sculptural and wall-based hinged canvases, which incorporate painting and pre-Columbian embroidery techniques to explore hybridity, automation and technology. The exhibition is the first solo institutional presentation of Toranzo Jaeger’s work in the UK.
Toranzo Jaeger’s paintings are filled with driverless cars and autonomous space shuttles which represent structures of power that perpetuate and profit from colonial legacies of oppression. Through images of engines, cars and space travel Toranzo Jaeger disrupts the capitalist and neo-colonialist future being sold by tech billionaires and the commercial space race. She challenges this vision and suggests alternative decolonised, queer futures, in which joy and chaos coexist together as a means of resistance and critique.
History collides with both the present and the future in Toranzo Jaeger’s work as she revises and subverts familiar iconography from the western art canon to imagine alternate visions of history. We see Lucas Cranach’s Fountain of Youth (1546) reimagined as a queer utopia in End of Capitalism, The Fountain (2022). Meanwhile Hans Memling’s Last Judgement (c. 1460s) is repurposed in Deep adaptation on Audi Aicon 2020 costume design by H. Memling (2019) to signal climate emergency and societal collapse as witnessed in the rear-view mirror from the safety of a high spec autonomous car.
Chaos, control and desire are explored through plush interiors of driverless electric and hybrid vehicles, and images of queer love making, lush tropical greenery or the familiar motif of the heart. The exhibition title speaks to a hopefulness threaded throughout Toranzo Jaeger’s work. In the midst of the climate emergency, ongoing colonial legacies of oppression, hyper-capitalist technologies and systems of control, Toranzo Jaeger’s paintings invite us to imagine A future in the light of darkness – a future in spite of darkness.
ENDS
NOTES TO EDITORS
For media enquiries contact Clare Stimpson, Head of Digital and Communications, media@modernartoxford.org.uk, +44 (0)1865 813 826 or Alison Wright PR, alison@alisonwrightpr.com, +44 (0)7814 796 930
About Frieda Toranzo Jaeger
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger lives and works in Mexico City. Recent solo exhibitions include Heartcore, Barbara Weiss Gallery, Berlin (2023); Autonomous Drive at MoMA PS1, New York (2022) and The Perpetual Sense of Redness, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2021). She has also had solo shows at Arcadia Missa in London, Reena Spaulings in New York and her work has been featured in group shows at BALTIC, Gateshead, UK; National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; Frac Lorraine, Metz, France; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and MoMA Warsaw, Poland. Toranzo Jaeger was the recipient of the HISCOX Art Prize in 2016 and her work has been acquired by public collections including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; and the German National Art Collection, Bonn, Germany.
About Modern Art Oxford
Located in one of the world’s great cities of learning, Modern Art Oxford is a leading contemporary art space with an international reputation for innovative and ambitious programming. We promote creativity in all its visual forms as an agent of social change. Our programmes, both in person and online, are shaped by a belief in dialogue between contemporary art and ideas and celebrate the relevance of contemporary visual culture to society today.
www.modernartoxford.org.uk
Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street, Oxford, UK, OX1 1BP
info@modernartoxford.org.uk 01865 722 733
