Antonio Vega Macotela's work is multidisciplinary and designed for specific communities and contexts. Through his work, the artist explores the notions of work, value, and exchange, specifically concerning the system through which social relations are established and negotiated. It also refers to alienation in economic systems and their social structures. Vega Macotela uses art as a tool for change in which he reevaluates and recontextualizes the meaning of everyday life.
The artist focuses on the processes of creation, the interactions, negotiations, and collaborations involved in today’s society. His work is located at the intersection of several equivalence chains that connect labor and artistic practice within a single economy, participating in prolonged temporalities.
Antonio Vega Macotela
Mexico City, Mexico, 1980. Lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico and Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
«The work of Vega Macotela creates a territory in which we can talk about economy as a system that creates representations and interactions.»
The work of Vega Macotela creates a territory in which we can talk about the economy as a system that generates representations and interactions. In the artist’s own words: "art is significant; it is symbolic. The actions that affect society are also symbolic, and the artist's work lies in working with those symbols and those meanings. It is about expanding wills and generating possibilities to see and think.”
Time exchange 148 | 2008 | Cigarette butts | 8.27 x 11.02 inches
Time exchange 63 | 2006 | Pen on paper 11.02 x 16.93 inches
Antonio Vega Macotela is currently an artist in residence at the Brooklyn campus of the Amant Foundation (New York). He has undertaken other residencies at Gasworks in London (2018), Rijksakademie in Corea (2015) and Amsterdam (2011-2012), and Le Pavillon, Palais du Tokio in Paris (2014).
Selected exhibitions: 34th Bienal de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo Brazil (2021) ; Highline Art, New York (2021); Toi et moi, on ne vit pas sur la même planète”, Centre Pompidou-Metz (2021); 12º Bienal de Taipei, Taipei, China (2020) ; “#TodosSomosHonolulu”, LABOR, Mexico City, Mexico (2020) ; “Fin del Futuro”, La Tallera, Cuernavaca, Mexico (2019) ; “Incendio”, CIAP, Hasselt, Belgium (2019) ; “Confortably Numb”, Another Space, New York, United States (2018) ; “Constructing the World: Art and Economy 2008-2018”, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany (2018) ; “Stories of Almost Everyone”, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, United States (2018) ; documenta 14, Kassel, Germany (2017) ; “Lecturas de un territorio fracturado”, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2017) ; “Asymmetrical Warfare”, Witte de With Contemporary Art Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2015) ; “Pheidippidics – Studies on Exhaustion”, LABOR, Mexico City, Mexico (2015).
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