Two Gazes on the Same Canvas: A Critique of the MUAC Exhibitions (August 2025)

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The University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) presents a program that, true to its mission, generates an intense dialogue about the present. Two of its current exhibitions, the retrospective of Mexican artist Magali Lara and the conceptual work of the Swiss duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, are a clear example of this polarity. Below are two critical analyses of each exhibition, one from a conservative perspective and the other from a feminist one.

Exhibition: Magali Lara Retrospective

The work of Magali Lara is characterized by an intimate exploration of the body, illness, nature, and female subjectivity through drawing, painting, and artist's books.

The Conservative Critique: "The Labyrinth of the Self: An Art That Forgets the Universal"

Magali Lara's retrospective at MUAC is an exercise in introspection so profound that it runs the risk of drowning in its own subjectivity. While a certain delicacy in her line cannot be denied, the work as a whole presents itself as a kind of exposed personal diary, where biographical anecdote—illness, the body, personal emotion—eclipses any aspiration for the transcendent beauty or universal truth that great art should seek.

There is a perceived insistence on the fragmentary and the ephemeral that results in an unsatisfying aesthetic experience. Where is the technical mastery, the rigorous composition, the search for a harmony that elevates the spirit? In its place, we find a language that seems more interested in self-therapy than in communication with a broad audience. If contemporary art is to have a place in society, it must aspire to unite us in the contemplation of the sublime, not to divide us in the incomprehension of the purely personal. Lara's work, regrettably, appears to choose the latter path.

The Feminist Critique: "Cartographies of the Body: The Political Power of the Intimate"

Magali Lara's retrospective is a necessary and forceful celebration of the female experience. For decades, art history, written by men, relegated the subjectivity of women to the realm of the "minor" or the "domestic." Lara shatters this conception by taking her own corporeality, affections, and vulnerabilities as the epicenter of a complex and powerful artistic universe.

Her work is a radical political act: that of articulating the female body not as an object of the male gaze, but as a sovereign territory of knowledge and experience. By tracing the cartographies of illness, desire, and nature from her own skin, Lara creates a visual language that validates and gives voice to systematically silenced realities. Every line, every stain, is an affirmation that the personal is political. MUAC is right to present this work not as an intimate diary, but as what it truly is: a fundamental archive of the resistance and affirmation of women in Mexican art.

Exhibition: Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz

The work of this artistic duo explores, through video and installation, the deconstruction of gender identities, queer history, and power dynamics, often using performance and re-enactment.

The Conservative Critique: "The Activism That Displaced Art"

To walk through the gallery dedicated to Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz is to wonder if we have reached a point where the ideological pamphlet has completely supplanted artistic creation. The work, hermetic and laden with a theoretical jargon accessible only to initiates, seems to have the sole purpose of promoting a specific political agenda, in this case, that of queer theory.

Any glimmer of beauty, harmony, or technical skill is notably absent. Instead, we are offered a series of cold and calculated conceptual exercises that seem more suited for a gender studies seminar than for an art museum. Art, in its noblest expression, must transcend political divisions and speak a universal language. The work of Boudry and Lorenz, on the contrary, revels in exclusion and confrontation, alienating any viewer who does not share their particular and restrictive worldview. It is a clear example of how art, when placed at the service of ideology, loses its soul.

The Feminist Critique: "Dismantling the Norm: A Necessary Visual Insurrection"

The exhibition by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz is one of the most lucid and politically potent proposals that MUAC has hosted. Their work functions like a high-precision scalpel, dissecting the power structures that sustain gender norms and heteronormativity. Far from being a pamphlet, their work is a complex visual investigation into how identities are constructed and can be dismantled.

By using performance and the re-enactment of historical moments, the artists not only make visible queer histories that have been erased from official archives but also expose the artificiality of binary categories (man/woman, normal/abnormal). Their aesthetic, often austere and conceptual, does not seek complacency but the activation of critical thinking. It is an art that discomforts because it forces us to question the foundations of our own identity and the violence implicit in "normality." In a country like Mexico, with a historical debt to its dissident communities, the work of Boudry and Lorenz is not just relevant; it is urgent.