Milena Muzquiz’s works provide a direct encounter with her wit and her engagement with personal narratives and memories. Her paintings of women surrounded, if not enveloped, by flower blossoms, are recollections of memories of places, oozing with nostalgia. Viewers are invited to share her reminiscences of a semi-imaginary world, recalling her Tijuana birthplace and childhood vacations. The artist’s images and motifs feel familiar, rendered in expressionist brushstrokes.  

 Muzquiz’s ceramics are functioning vases, tactile and meant to be handled. In a process of cutting and scoring her clay, applying it to the vessel like paper or ‘magazine cut-outs’ then layering colors, patterns, images, tendrils, baubles and pendants, she creates complex self-portraits, so full of movement, they’re almost performative. ‘My ceramics are not so far from my performance art,’ agrees Muzquiz, whose international reputation was established as one half of the art band Los Super Elegantes, performing for 15 years with Martiniano López Crozet. 

Founded in the 1990s, Los Super Elegantes became a combination of installation, video art and music, which circulated in both institutional spaces such as museums and art fairs, but also in music festivals around Latin America. The artists referenced the fantasy of music understood as mass entertainment as a moldable and open possibility; Muzquiz will reflect this afterwards in her individual work by altering the dynamics of the exhibition space, incorporating performative and participative aspects.   

Milena Muzquiz trained at the California College of Fine Arts, San Francisco and then completed an MFA at the Art Centre College of Design, Pasedena, tutored by conceptual artist Mike Kelley.  

Recent solo exhibitions include: Travesía Cuatro Guadalajara (2022, 2014); Travesía Cuatro CDMX (2020); Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, Spain (2019, 2017, 2014); David Gill Gallery, London, UK (2019); Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA lead by the Getty Foundation (2017); Pantaleone Gallery, Palermo, Italy (2010); Interior Projects, Los Angeles, United States (2008); and Deitch Projects, New York, United States (2000).  

She has taken part in group exhibitions at MASA Galería, Mexico City (2020); Instituto de Visión, Bogotá, CO (2019); Bohossian Foundation, Villa Empain, Brussels, BE (2017); La Casa Encendida, Madrid, ES (2016); Dickinson Gallery, New York, US (2016); Peter Kilchmann, CH (2015); 6th Liverpool Biennial, UK (2010); 28th São Paulo Biennale, BR (2008); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, FR (2007); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, US (2007); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, US (2006).  

Milena Muzquiz lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.