Marta Minujín’s first solo exhibition in Mexico, To Live in Art, brings together historical and recent works that attest to her lasting impact on the global art scene. For over six decades, Minujín has redefined contemporary art and helped shape movements that challenged convention, establishing her as one of the most important figures in Argentine art and an international icon. The exhibition’s title reflects the artist’s desire to infuse every aspect of life with art. A pioneer in happenings, performance, and interactive work, Minujín has demonstrated throughout her career that art can infiltrate every aspect of our lives—from the most intimate spaces to global politics and markets.

One of the exhibition’s central works is El obelisco acostado (The Obelisk Lying Down), presented in Mexico for the first time and originally conceived for the I Bienal Latinoamericana de São Paulo in 1978. Lying across the gallery, the work replicates the obelisk at the Plaza de la República in Buenos Aires, inviting visitors to walk through and discover a series of projected videos. One documents the original obelisk in Argentina, while another stages its supposed relocation from Buenos Aires to São Paulo. These videos transform the sculpture into a narrative and conceptual device that questions the origin and meaning of cultural myths. Photographs of the original installation are also on view alongside a silver sculpture of the obelisk shown progressively toppling down.

Rather than destroy the monument, Minujín displaces, inverts, and opens it, rendering it playful and accessible. Verticality and the symbolism of authoritarian regimes embedded in many monuments have long been targets of Minujín’s work, which seeks to disarm such structures through public participation. El obelisco acostado gave rise to the series La caída de los mitos universales (The Fall of Universal Myths), a powerful dismantling of the symbols that uphold official state narratives. Its continued relevance today underscores the urgent need to imagine, through horizontality, new forms of representation and collective experience.

Surrounding the fallen obelisk is a selection of mattress works that Minujín has been creating since 2006, resurfacing a material she first used in the 1960s while studying in Paris. Initially, she repurposed discarded mattresses found on the streets near hospitals, painting them with striped patterns inspired by the fashionable miniskirts of the era—infusing them with a vibrant, provocative energy that echoed the spirit of the sexual revolution. When asked about her choice of material, she replied: “How could we not bring into the language of art an object where we spend half of our lives, where we are born, love, make love, and die?” In the more recent works presented here, Minujín interweaves soft sculptural forms painted in bold colors, conveying movement, vitality, and joy.

These works are accompanied by drawings that echo the mattress sculpture’s exuberant forms and palettes, offering a closer look at the artist’s pictorial practice and the relationship between her two- and three-dimensional work. Taken together, the mattress works and the obelisk reveal Minujín's broader artistic and political vision for transforming civic space and cultural memory.

To Live in Art invites us to appreciate the breadth of Minujín’s practice and to reflect on her role in positioning Latin American art as a vehicle for the global avant-garde.