Minneapolis, January 10, 2013-The Walker Art Center will presentAbraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites, the first in-depth contextual exhibition of Abraham Cruzvillegas, one of the most important artists to come out of a burgeoning art scene in Mexico City. Informed by the sociopolitical contexts of Latin America, Cruzvillegas (b. 1968) has garnered much attention for his dynamic assemblage sculptures made of found objects. The exhibition will run from March 23 through September 22, 2013.

Since the 1990s, Cruzvillegas has developed a riveting body of work-including sculpture, installation, film/video, and theater-that derives from the social and economic realities of his hometown in Ajusco. While his work has been widely presented in Mexico and Europe, his exposure in the U.S. still remains limited. Organized by Walker Senior Curator for Visual Arts Clara Kim, this mid-career survey will focus on the last 10 years of his practice and will feature individual sculptures and expansive sculptural environments, as well as recent experiments in video, film, and performance. Following the Walker's presentation, the exhibition will embark on an international tour to the Haus der Kunst in Munich in early 2014 and the Jumex Foundation in Mexico City and Museo Amparo in Puebla who will jointly present the exhibition in Mexico in fall 2014.

Interested in what he calls autoconstrucción or "self-construction," Cruzvillegas roots his practice within the urban landscape of his childhood home, where structures are in a constant state of change as materials become available and as necessity dictates. The conceptual framework and ideology of his dynamic sculptural work begins here. While echoing art historical precedents (Duchampian transformation of everyday objects, arte povera's use of impoverished materials, and the uncanny compositions of assemblage), Cruzvillegas employs improvisation and alternate economic systems that privilege craft over art, the handmade over the manufactured, and processes that necessitate "making do" or learned, communal behavior. This point of departure becomes a model for a way of building out of scarcity and a metaphor for the construction of the artist's own identity.

Developed in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition will include an important body of sculptures first exhibited at the 2003 Venice Biennale, in a section titled Everyday Altered curated by Gabriel Orozco; a series of sculptural installations created during a six-year period of residencies; and more recent experiments that expand his thinking onautoconstrucción through film (developed with a film cooperative), video (in which the artist's parents narrate their own stories in the form of oral history), performance (collaborative musical and action-based theater), and a source material archive room. Shown together for the first time, the exhibition will illustrate Cruzvillegas's contributions, and motivations and influences that inform his thinking, as well as his commitment to social and political realities that shape everyday lives.