Mario García Torres

Mario García Torres is a Mexican conceptual and visual artist born in 1975 in Monclova, Coahuila. Based in Mexico City, he is internationally recognised for a practice that examines how history, time and narrative are constructed and experienced within art. García Torres studied Fine Arts at the Universidad de Monterrey, receiving his BFA in 1998, and later earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2005 as a Fulbright grantee. Early in his career, he also worked in the field of electronic arts curating at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. In 2007, he received the Cartier Award at the Frieze Art Fair. His practice encompasses film, sound, performance, photography, installation and video. It often takes lesser-known or overlooked histories as its starting point, revisiting historical exhibitions and unfinished projects to blur the boundaries between past and present while challenging notions of truth, certainty and the linear narratives of art history. For much of his career, García Torres has chosen not to date his works, using “n.d.” (no date) as a recurring device to undermine conventional ideas of chronological artistic development. García Torres’s work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He has also participated in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial and dOCUMENTA in Kassel. His work is held in prominent public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Modern in London and the Musée National d’Art Moderne–Centre Pompidou in Paris. Through research-based projects that frequently juxtapose fact and fiction, as well as past and present, García Torres invites viewers to reconsider how historical narratives are constructed, remembered and questioned. His work has made a significant contribution to the continuing development of contemporary conceptual art.