Ángela Gurría’s sculptural production began to achieve some definition in the 1950s. In 1951, she started her formal training in the discipline under the supervision first of Germán Cueto and then of the Honduran-born artist Mario Zamora. These two sculptors embody the two poles between which her work has shuttled in a constant back-and-forth over the course of her career. One end is characterized by an experimental sensibility and a privileging of abstract solutions; the other by figuration and more traditional sculptural techniques. Gurría held her first solo exhibition at the Galería Diana at the tail end of the 1950s. The 1960s provided new experiences that continued to shape her work. Of the utmost importance was a series of commissions that took her work to a monumental scale, in the form of public art. With this, she began a series of urban sculpture projects that stand out within her entire body of work.

It is not too bold to claim that during the 1960s, Gurría’s most widely recognized works focused on abstract solutions as well as non-traditional materials and techniques. In 1960, for example, the sculptor completed one of her first works dedicated to representing desert flora. Flor del desierto is made in aluminum (a completely new material at the time) and features a rather aerodynamically shaped volume, although it does not escape a certain figurative feeling. Cueto’s influence is apparent in other works that Gurría made during those years, primarily those that were produced with plate metal, sheet metal and steel bars. Examples include Estrella roja, Estrella negra and Río Papaloapan, all shown at the artist’s 1970 solo exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes —an event that indicates the notable recognition that her work had acquired just ten years after her first solo show.

It is not too bold to claim that during the 1960s, Gurría’s most widely recognized works focused on abstract solutions as well as non-traditional materials and techniques. In 1960, for example, the sculptor completed one of her first works dedicated to representing desert flora. Flor del desierto is made in aluminum (a completely new material at the time) and features a rather aerodynamically shaped volume, although it does not escape a certain figurative feeling. Cueto’s influence is apparent in other works that Gurría made during those years, primarily those that were produced with plate metal, sheet metal and steel bars. Examples include Estrella roja, Estrella negra and Río Papaloapan, all shown at the artist’s 1970 solo exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes —an event that indicates the notable recognition that her work had acquired just ten years after her first solo show.

Gurría was not alone in this situation. While it is true that at the beginning of her career the artist had used a male pseudonym (Alberto Urías) to enter open calls and competitions, the situation changed somewhat in the 1960s. During that decade, a renowned group of sculptors took shape whose work redefined the paths that the discipline would take in Mexico. Elizabeth Catlett, Geles Cabrera, Helen Escobedo and Lorraine Pinto were other members of this group. Their contributions include original solutions using traditional techniques, the incorporation of new materials to the field of sculpture, kinetic pieces and public art.

In Gurría’s case, part of the notoriety that she had achieved by the late 1960s came from her first institutional distinctions and highly visible commissions. As noted above, she did this with designs that were far removed from figuration and that made use of materials like steel and concrete. In 1967, her project for the lattice-door of the Bank of Mexico’s printing press received the first prize in the category of Sculpture Integrated into Architecture at the 3rd Bienal de Escultura that was held at the Museo de Arte Moderno. A year later, Gurría was invited by Mathias Göeritz and Pedro Ramírez Vázquez to participate in the Ruta de la Amistad, a monumental sculpture project that was part of the Cultural Olympiad accompanying the 19th Olympic Games, which Mexico City hosted in 1968. Her contribution to this initiative was Señales, a concrete sculpture over 30 meters tall consisting of two structures that represent half horseshoes (or a single horseshoe split in two), one painted white and the other black. Although Gurría has acknowledged Cueto’s influence on her work over Göeritz’s, her understanding of monumental sculpture as public art that is collaboratively produced and collectively received aligns closely with the German artist’s.

Mockups and models are very important in carrying out these monumental works. The mockups for Río Papaloapan (1970) and Homenaje a la ceiba (1976) allow us to appreciate how well she was able to scale her sculpture down, which is easy to see by comparing them to the final large-format products, whether at the entrance to the Museo de Arte Moderno or at the Hotel Intercontinental in Mexico City. Viewing other models of unrealized public projects or large-format sculptures like Resaca (1974) or Trompo chico (ca. 1970), it is easy to imagine how they would look on a larger scale.

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In 1960 Juan O’Gorman painted a remarkable portrait of Ángela Gurría. An admirer of her work, O’Gorman owned her stone sculpture Espejo del tiempo (1964), which he placed in the garden of his home studio on Avenida San Jerónimo. In his painting of her, the architect and muralist has put Gurría on a seat formed by the natural shape of a tree, suggesting that nature itself provides certain predetermined plastic forms. This resonates with Gurría’s sculptural practice, especially her work in stone and different minerals. As she herself has noted on different occasions, in several works using these materials she has taken advantage of their natural forms, accidents and unexpected formations. This kind of attention and sensibility is related to the title of this exhibition: Escuchar la materia (Listen to Matter). In O’Gorman’s portrait, one of Gurría’s hands rests on the edge of the seat in such a way that her grip seems to be molding the wood —a discreet feature that suggests her practice as a sculptor.

The relationship between Gurría’s three-dimensional production and the natural world goes beyond her use of certain materials in her practice. It is also expressed repeatedly in terms of representation, as if she were attempting through her sculptures to motivate a new way of perceiving nature. Upon producing the monumental sculpture Homenaje a la ceiba, the artist commented that she had sought to materialize a genus of massive tree that does not exist in Mexico City. The animal and plant kingdoms are constant features of her work, as are allusions to the elements, like water and air. Gurría has conceived a particular sculptural bestiary made up of frogs, mice, jaguars, owls, and other animals. Butterflies, for example, are featured in El vuelo de la mariposa and Celosía de mariposas (both 1993). The way the artist represents this insect in her sculpture has a certain ambiguity, causing it to resemble a skull and thus encapsulating a cycle of life and renewal with which lepidoptera tend to be associated. In her pieces dedicated to the plant world, the artist made a series of works in the 1990s, in both stone and metal, which continued to develop her interest in desert flora. In 1993 she made several Cactus using steel, as well as Flor de cactus, a carved stone piece.

Spirals are another constant feature in her work, through which she alludes to the natural world. This is apparent in her use of this form to suggest the coursing movement of water in Río Papaloapan, for example. The spiral is also at play in another monumental sculpture completed in the early 1980s in a residential area of the State of Mexico: Espiral-Caracol. By evoking the form of a spiral shell (caracol), Gurría puts her work in relation to symbolic meanings deriving from classical Mesoamerican cultures. From this perspective, the form of the spiral shell also alludes to the wind. Here one can appreciate the sculptor’s interest in these cultural forms, both for their symbolic aspects and for the plastic solutions they offer her own art objects, a point on which she has reflected over the course of her career. Another example is the piece that belonged to O’Gorman, Espejo del tiempo, which features multiple faces that one could associate with ancient ceramic pieces from Tlatilco.

In the texts written about Ángela Gurría’s work, commentators have scarcely noticed the presence of a certain humanist vocation, as well as the way in which her production has responded critically to different social and political events that took place during the last six decades. In 1976, for example, she completed the piece Libertad de expresión as a critical commentary on the repressive actions taken against the newspaper Excélsior and its director Julio Scherer by the authoritarian regime of Luis Echeverría. In 1993, she made the stone work ¡Ya basta!, which represents the figure of a child in an allusion to Xipe-Totec, or “Our Lord the Flayed One,” as a critique of the rampant and highly visible violence that was being experienced in Mexico in those years, and which has been on the rise ever since. A drawing that served as a study for this piece is Niño Xipe (1995), which uses clippings and pasted paper to lend a certain three-dimensional character to the image —as if to represent the shadow cast by the hands. Calavera (1993) suggests a commentary similar to that in ¡Ya basta!, primarily if one considers its close formal link to Tzompantli, a public work that the artist also made that year at the main entrance of the Centro Nacional de las Artes. The sculptural diptych Jaguares—La muerte en Chiapas (1997) obviously refers to the armed conflict that began in the southern state of Chiapas in 1994. According to Gurría’s comments, this piece was inspired by the famous photograph by Pedro Valtierra in which an indigenous woman confronts a member of the Mexican Army; hence, one representation of the jaguar is feminine and the other masculine.

Along these same critical lines, Gurría’s choice of black and white in her older piece Señales did not fit with the brilliant colors that marked the spectacle and celebration of the Olympic Games in 1968. Compared to the colors used in other monumental sculptures on the Ruta de la Amistad, its aspect is sober —somber, even. In the same way, the opposition of white and black, as well as the division of the horseshoe into two parts, could be interpreted in relation to the open antagonism that was being experienced on a global scale in the era of the Cold War. One public work that stands out as especially intriguing is her Monumento al trabajador del drenaje profundo (1974). For this radical commemorative work, the artist took several segments of concrete from the sewer system, in the manner of a found object, and raised them up on monumental columns of different heights. This original urban sculpture no doubt brings to mind the sort of anti-monument (like classical columns crowned with toilets) painted both by her friend O’Gorman and by Frida Kahlo as critical comments on society and culture.

One could argue that Ángela Gurría’s sculptural practice encapsulates fundamental changes that sculpture underwent in Mexico during the second half of the twentieth century. Although the artist chose to outline certain considerations and interests by using a register that is patently modern, her work expresses the movement between modernism’s legacy and concerns present in contemporary art. Without question, the link to the conditions and problematics of the historical moment is one such consideration. To this we could also add her formal and material experimentation, her renewed appreciation for the natural world, her reuse of certain readymade objects and her attention to architecture’s integration into and dialogue with its broader urban context.