For more than sixty years, Marta Minujín (Buenos Aires, 1943) has challenged and expanded the definition of art. A pioneer of happenings, performance, and participatory environments, she has continually reimagined the relationship between art and lived experience.
At Art Basel Paris, kurimanzutto presents—in a solo booth designed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo—a selection of works spanning Minujín’s career, juxtaposing her earliest experiments with informalist painting, sculptural explorations of cultural icons, iconic mattresses, and recent works conceived in the wake of the global pandemic.
Minujín’s early paintings are infused with raw materiality and a visceral engagement with decay and transformation. In the early 1960s, she used cardboard, pigments, glue, and unconventional materials to create earthy, dense, textured surfaces reminiscent of Buenos Aires’s abraded walls. Inspired by performance artist Alberto Greco, who declared ordinary urban structures as art, Minujín transposed the wall to the canvas. These precarious surfaces assert her radical claim that painting can be unstable, temporary, and inseparable from urban realism.
These paintings are shown alongside mattress works that Minujín has produced since 2006. The motif first appeared in the 1960s, when she painted mattresses with striped patterns inspired by fashionable miniskirts, charging them with a vibrant, provocative energy that echoed the spirit of the sexual revolution. In her more recent works, she constructs intertwined soft forms painted in bold colors, conveying movement, vitality, and joy. Accompanying drawings reflect these exuberant forms and palettes, offering a closer look at the interplay between her two- and three-dimensional practices.
By the 1980s, Minujín was dismantling symbols that uphold official state and cultural narratives. Her bronze sculptures depict the Statue of Liberty, the Venus de Milo, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa in slow-motion collapse. Part of The Fall of Universal Myths series, these works combine monumentality with irony, reminding us that even entrenched cultural icons are shaped by time and subject to shifting forms of representation.
Her most recent paintings return to the mattress motif, stretching thin, hand-painted fabric strips across large canvases. Each work centers on a dominant hue, as in Red Paradise (2024–25). Emerging from her earlier series Pandemia/Endemia (2020–22), created in response to COVID-19, these paintings preserve the process of gluing striped mattress fabrics onto large surfaces, translating that methodology into a celebration of life and passion. Inviting viewers to immerse themselves in their vibrant colors, Minujín positions the mattress once again as a stage for the joys and dramas of collective existence.
At Art Basel Paris, these works affirm Minujín’s singular practice: an art porous to the world, where continuous experimentation and reinvention remain the conditions of both art and life.
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Conversation:
Marta Minujín & Frida Escobedo
Moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
October 23, 11:30 am
Petit Palais, Paris
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booth B43, designed by Frida Escobedo
inquire: karensofie@kurimanzutto.com
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Art Basel Paris
Grand Palais, Paris