Milena Muzquiz. Make or Break

In the organizer's words:

Milena Muzquiz's solo exhibition "Make or Break" is Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle's Various Others Project 2026, conceived in collaboration with Travesía Cuatro (Madrid, Guadalajara, Mexico City). The exhibition offers a concentrated insight into the complexity of Muzquiz's oeuvre and brings together her ceramic works and oil paintings.

Born in Mexico and based in Los Angeles, Muzquiz locates the origins of her imagery in the visual landscape of Tijuana, a border town characterized by tourism, trade and cultural overlays. Beaches, flowers, lucky charms and fragments of decorative displays - motifs familiar from souvenir stores - form less of a fixed iconography than a starting point. In both her paintings and her ceramics, these elements are distorted, layered and reassembled, undermining the seductive simplicity of her original images. What initially appears playful or ornamental gradually reveals a more complex terrain in which the constructed promise of paradise meets ecological pressures, cultural projections and personal memory. In a fluid alternation between painting and sculpture, Muzquiz treats objects and images as mutable forms. Her ceramic vessels - loosely reminiscent of vases or decorative containers - develop into sculptural bodies that oscillate between utility function and character figure. In an additive process of modeling, glazing and painterly interventions, surfaces emerge that accumulate textures, protrusions and gestural traces and elude formal stability. Instead of condensing into clear symbols, these forms remain deliberately exuberant and unstable, moving between ornament, figuration and theatrical prop.

Floral motifs recur throughout the exhibition - both as decorative elements and as triggers of memory. Painted with gestural directness or emerging from ceramic surfaces, they evoke landscapes that are at once remembered, imagined and culturally mediated. By drawing on the visual codes of kitsch, craft and popular decoration, Muzquiz develops a visual language that is deliberately seductive and at the same time constantly irritating - a visual world in which sensual surface and structural dissonance are in permanent tension with one another.