Inside Four Studios Redefining Mexican Design

In the short time since its founding in 2019, the nomadic Mexico City-based gallery MASA has become a bellwether in the capital for collectible works that blur the distinction between art and design. Sculptural “Acapulco chairs” carved out of Mexican marble, concrete altars that reference pre-Hispanic and modernist Mexican art, floor-to-ceiling lamps shaped from ethereal brass ribbons: these are works that are helping to define the latest wave of contemporary Mexican design.

But to tell the story of MASA, you have to go back further, to 2016, when Estonian-born curator and creative director Agé Salajõe struck up a creative partnership with Héctor Esrawe, one of the leading figures of contemporary Mexican design. Together Agé and Héctor formed the design studio EWE but quickly realized that there was nowhere for them to exhibit their works.

“We were pushing collectible design, which was not done in Mexico at that point,” said Agé, who lived and worked in Los Angeles and London before coming for a visit and falling in love with Mexico City. She was followed shortly after by a friend from Los Angeles, the American artist and designer Brian Thoreen, who found a studio and began to create his collectible design works. “We realized that there is a community of artists here who are also interested in making three-dimensional works, so we were like, there’s definitely an absence in the market. We need to either create an exhibition together, or why don’t we create a gallery together?”

It took them a couple of years to find financing and pull in one more cofounder, OMR gallery co-founder Cristobal Riestra. “Then it became this sort of brainstorming among friends,” said Agé. “How can we do things differently? How can we break boundaries, disrupt, not a white gallery box—this whole idea of not having a physical space, but finding these interesting locations to create shows around.”

Their first exhibition, Collective/Collectible, took place in an abandoned 1970s-era home in Mexico City’s Paseo de las Palmas and asked what it means to be “from somewhere,” engaging with what artists have long sought in Mexico or believed the country to represent. For the site of their second exhibition, Recover/Uncover, MASA chose a castle-like building in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood built by German royals in the early 1900s. Like the first show, the second embraced the idiosyncrasies of the setting and challenged convention to present Mexico’s contemporary design scene on a global platform.

There have been seven MASA exhibitions in total, each in a different, unexpected setting and featuring artists either based in Mexico or creating work inspired by the country. The public response has been tremendous, and last year, MASA began to travel outside of Mexico City with exhibitions in Oaxaca and Miami. Next up are New York and Paris. The success of MASA has paralleled Mexico City’s cultural renaissance, as visitors have come in droves to tour its world-class restaurants, vibrant markets, dynamic arts scene and fairs like Zona Maco and Design Week Mexico.

Agé walked us through the gallery’s first exhibition of 2022, MASA Inc, which took over the seventh floor of a nondescript vacant office tower overlooking the Plaza de las Cibeles in Roma Norte. The exhibition, which opened in parallel to Zona Maco, is a playful “corporate takeover” at a time when people are rethinking their relationship to the workplace in a post-covid era. “MASA probably wouldn’t have been what it is in any other city in the world, because Mexico is really open to do things differently,” said Agé. “It’s just more disruptive in that way.”

Now MASA is having its next big moment as the gallery opens its first New York exhibition in a former federal post office at Rockefeller Center. Running from May 5 to June 24 and curated by frequent MASA collaborator Su Wu, Intervención/Intersección presents new functional work alongside significant historical works that complicate and extend the Mexican canon and celebrate the porosity between Mexico and the US.

In the leadup to the exhibition, we visited the Mexico City studios of five MASA artists as they prepared works for the upcoming show.

Brian Thoreen
Hammered copper works, home studio, San Miguel Chapultepec

Tucked deep in a courtyard among the tree-lined residential streets of San Miguel Chapultepec, a low-key district dotted with galleries and several houses designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Luis Barragán, is the sprawling home studio of the California-bred artist and designer Brian Thoreen.

The space, which he rents from the artist Thomas Glassford, feels like a world unto itself. Soft light filters in from the semi-translucent industrial siding that forms the roof of the central space. A gargantuan forked ficus tree juts up through openings in the ceiling. In every corner are Brian’s large sculptural works: tables made of ribboned black neoprene rubber and hand-hammered copper, vessels of glycerin and of molten glass, erotically bulbous, asymmetrical blown-glass sculptures Brian created for his experimental glassmaking collective Vissio.

“I like to find new ways to use materials. That’s the big driving force,” said Brian, as he pointed out a giant molded mound of raw beeswax that he plans to turn into flower vases. “We literally bought a hundred kilos of beeswax and came back here and started melting it, playing with it—but what we discovered is that when you melt and work with beeswax, it attracts bees. So there were all these bees coming into my studio,” said Brian. “It was amazing.”

This unorthodox engagement with materials is at the crux of Brian’s work—stemming from his background in fabrication and installation. His father is a contractor, and he spent his childhood at construction sites and in workshops working with his hands. He got his start in the art world working as a studio assistant for the sculptor Tony Delap, a pioneer of West Coast minimalism and Op Art, then spent 15 years working in the Los Angeles art scene as an installer, handler and fabricator, starting his own metal shop and eventually his own design practice.

“I’ve welded and fabricated pretty much every kind of material and form, but hammering sheets of copper into different forms, that’s something totally new that I’ve always wanted to explore,” said Brian as he and his studio assistant showed us their latest experiments in preparation for the MASA exhibition at Rockefeller Center.

“I’ve been trying to work out the texture as a test—how I want it hammered, trying to figure out how it looks and what the texture will be,” said Brian, who sources recycled industrial copper from the town of Santa Clara del Cobre in Michoacán, a center of copper work and metallurgy since pre-Hispanic times. “There’s this little shop there where it’s just artisans hammering copper. They put it in a fire to soften it, and then while it’s hot, they hammer it.”

The resulting pieces, which Brian started to exhibit in the last MASA show, are huge, rounded consoles, chairs and coffee tables—like gigantic glistening cosmic beads the color of drenched soil or the negative space of a Rembrandt. Like much, if not all, of what MASA exhibits, Brian’s copper works reinterpret Mexican craft heritage into a new, highly contemporary form. They’re daring and monumental, neither art nor design but somewhere between the two.

“With MASA, that’s a big thing for us,” said Brian. “This blurry area between art and design—that’s where we like to play.”

Panorammma
Rawhide table, metal workshop, Iztapalapa

The next studio we visited is not an artist’s studio at all but an industrial metal workshop in the hilly, rough-around-the-edges suburb of Iztapalapa where the design group Panorammma is working on a piece for the upcoming MASA exhibition. A young operation that developed organically during the pandemic, Panorammma arose when Maika Palazuelos needed to furnish her apartment in Mexico City not long after relocating from her hometown of Monterrey. Having worked in production and fabrication for other artists and galleries, Maika decided to take matters into her own hands.

“I was already working with all these amazing carpenters and metal workers, so I just started doing things for myself and then suddenly someone would come to my place and would want one made the same. Then I just started making more and experimenting more on these objects that I thought were really powerful,” said Maika by phone from Barcelona, where she is studying for her master’s.

Eventually she founded Panorammma, a furniture design studio that aims to redefine functional objects through experimentation with material and form, exploring past visions of the future and playing with “myths of memory” or imagined pasts. One of the studio’s first works in 2021 was the Chainmail Chair, which Maika and her production partner, Renee Espinosa, constructed out of 4,000 hand-linked steel rings in collaboration with a local medieval jewelry artisan.

While Maika is away, Renee is overseeing production on the piece they’re creating for the New York exhibition, a table made of rawhide in a deft reimagining of a material more commonly used for drumheads, lassos and whips. “The conventional way of using this material is for it to be oiled so that it would be flexible,” said Maika. ”But it can also be a very, very hard material—and it keeps its organic qualities. You can still see some of the veins of the animal, some of the pores. It works almost as a thermal plastic, because you can mold it, let it dry, and it will harden and keep that shape.”

“It’s a very primitive material used since the paleolithic to make housing. It has a long and interesting history,” said Maika, adding that rawhide has been used both as a torture device, by wrapping people’s arms in the material and letting it dry until it shrinks and twists their bones, and as a way to heal broken bones. To make the table, they stitched two rawhides together and let them dry over a mold they’ve created. “You have to attend the rawhide almost 24/7 in its drying process,” said Maika, who spends hours every day on the phone with Renee consulting about production. “It’s very easy, for example, for the sutures to rip apart. And you have to hydrate it in places where the moisture is evaporating quicker than in others. It’s almost like caring for a living creature.”

Other pieces in production include a wax alarm clock and what looks like two giant metal hooks covered in metallic barnacles, like some kind of menacing claw from a mechanical dystopia. “Back in summer I was visiting a chroming workshop in Mexico City, and I just noticed these hooks that are used to submerge pieces that are going to be plated—like car parts, into chrome vats,” said Maika. “They look like coral structures almost, like something that has been like at the bottom of the ocean forgotten for centuries, or maybe an ocean on Venus.”

Maika rescued the hooks, which were going to be discarded, and she and Renee started experimenting. They hope to make a chair—or maybe candle holders. But whatever they create, it will be something functional, that people actually live with—because it’s this that drew Maika to design in the first place. “I was frustrated with like exhibition modality in which the objects are things that stay almost dissected in a museum or in an exhibition and there is no co-living with them,” said Maika. “I was interested in the potential for these objects of use that respond in a way that, for example, a painting wouldn’t. There is more of an intimate level of interaction.”

Adeline de Monseignat
Kiinetic stone sculptures, Studio Block M74, Colonia Guerrero

The studio of Dutch-Monegasque sculptor Adeline de Monseignat is housed within Studio Block M74, an independent art space set in a 900-square-meter former pantyhose factory in Mexico City’s Colonia Guerrero neighborhood. Adeline founded M74 in 2018 with her Mexican husband, Pablo de Laborde Lascaris, also a sculptor, converting it into six studios, an exhibition space, a library and a communal work area—all tailored to the specific needs of the contemporary sculptor.

“We took it as a mission to divide all the spaces to make room for sculptors to use,” said Adeline, as she showed us around the labyrinthine factory space. “There were no spaces like this dedicated to sculpture. We made the doors wider than usual. There’s a docking space here where we can load and unload sculptures. And every sculptor can live here—they have a bed, shower, all the things necessary to have a living and working space.”

On a worktable in front of her was a miniature model of Seed Stack, the first work Adeline showed with MASA. Made of Dorado Tepexi marble, a Mexican limestone, the interactive sculpture is inspired by the seed formation of corn as found in the 1949 Mexico City statue, “El Monumento a la Madre”—as if two slices of corn cob have been blown up to monumental scale.

“Most of my pieces are inspired by nature, the symbol of the egg, the sphere or the seed,” said Adeline. “It’s this notion of potential within those tiny, tiny objects that I find fascinating. I collect them, and their shapes tend to be quite beautiful. And then I tend to take very, very small shapes and blow them up to large scale.”

Born in Monaco, Adeline grew up in the south of France near the border with Italy. At the age of 17, she moved to London to study—first literature, then painting. She spent a year traveling around Europe and eventually to New York, where she first started sculpting. Since then, Adeline’s work, which engages with mythology, symbolism and anthropomorphism, has been shown worldwide in galleries and institutions such as Blain Southern, Saatchi Gallery, Freud Museum, Royal Society of Sculptors and numerous international art fairs.

Adeline first came to Mexico in 2017 for an art residency. “I was meant to stay for a month, and I ended up moving here,” she said. Not long after, MASA invited her to take part in their first exhibition. Up until that point, she had only done non-functional sculpture, Art with a capital “A.”

“They challenged me with this notion of including interactivity and functionality in my work,” said Adeline “It’s something that up until then I had resisted, yet was already present in my work in the way that I would invite people to sit within an installation. But I didn’t really acknowledge it or didn’t want to acknowledge it. And they really opened my eyes to the possibility.”

Her interactive 2021 sculpture Seedscape, which she created for “MASA Inc,” consists of large, rounded mounds of stone set on a bed of pebbles that evokes pregnancy, motherhood and birth at a time when Adeline was first becoming a mother herself. The stone she used for the piece is travertino jalapa, a warm, beige limestone quarried in Mexico.

“It’s a very humble sort of stone,” said Adeline. “Marble tends to have more luxurious connotations, and I love working with marble, but sometimes I like a more humble material.” Before she started creating works out of stone, Adeline went to Italy to spend time in a marble quarry there, where she spent hours talking to the quarry workers.

“I got to understand that they view the mountain as something that’s alive,” she said. “They live all around the mountain and they say at night they can even hear the mountain weep over all that she’s giving us and all that we’re taking away from her. They are these really tough Italian workers and they talked about this mountain with such poetry and delicacy.” Adeline was so taken with the experience that she decided to shoot a film there in which the mountain is depicted as a living entity. “And we’re extracting these pieces of her flesh,” said Adeline “It’s not a coincidence that marble has been used to portray flesh of the human figure for so long. There are the veins and the imperfections—just the correlation and similarities between marble and the human body have really struck me.”

Since her time in Italy, Adeline has consistently worked with stone as a sculpting material, doing the small-scale carving work herself and the larger scale stonework with bigger workshops and studios. Her newest work, which she was just finishing when we visited her studio, is an interactive sculpture inspired by the shape of two beans in a pod, where the space between them is formed out of polished bronze. Like her other works for MASA, the new piece is fully functional: it can be used as a bench or viewed solely as an artwork—or both.

“I don’t necessarily engage with the idea of just making a chair or a stool,” said Adeline. “I make sculptures but in a way that the audience is invited to be a part of the work. It’s a space I’m creating for their body to inhabit.”

Héctor Esrawe
Sculptural pieces in brass and green Oaxaca onyx, Esrawe Studio, Roma Norte

To reach the studio of legendary Mexican designer Héctor Esrawe, you enter through an unassuming door off a side street in the picturesque neighborhood of Roma Norte and into an alternate universe—a vast working design studio set within a cavernous 600-square-meter former dancehall built in the 1950s.

Héctor and his team have stripped back all the interiors of the space, ripping out the false ceiling to expose the intricate gable wood beam construction that holds up the roof and creating a skylight where natural light floods in. Within the airy industrial space is a showroom, where collectible design works, such as sand-casted bronze Memoria Stools and stone pieces from last year’s Altar collection, are scattered across the floor and on a towering shelf system that divides the space. On a free-standing white wall are several Golden Magma wall lamps made of amber blown glass and volcanic stone for Art Basel Miami in 2018.

Various teams sit at long tables in the open area, which functions as a kind of factory of design. Some work for Esrawe Studio, the multidisciplinary commercial practice he founded in 2003 that specializes in furniture, interior design and architectural solutions for hospitality, cultural and residential projects. Others work for EWE Studio, the practice he founded in 2017 with Agé and Manuel Bañó, which is devoted to limited-edition sculptural and functional works that preserve and advance Mexico’s rich artisanal heritage.

“I hate the idea of being comfortable. There’s something inside me where I have a need to keep on learning, and I think all my alliances and my philosophy are based on that,” said Héctor. “I link with projects that promote constant learning.”

Born in Mexico City to Lebanese migrant parents, Héctor knew from a young age that he wanted to pursue design but he had no idea what kind of designer he wanted to be.

“I was completely confused about what to do,” said Héctor. “Because I wanted to do architecture. I wanted to do sculpture. Then I wanted to do painting. I wanted to do robotics.” Eventually, he was so confused that he went to see a school guidance counselor. “She asked me, do you know about this practice called industrial design? And I opened a book, and I remember it was like one session.” Héctor was sold. He finished his studies while working for other designers and founded his own small practice not long after graduating.

Furniture design led to spatial design and interiors, which led to architecture, all under the aegis of Esrawe Studio. Then during a two-year period between 2016 and 2018, Hector cofounded EWE, MASA, the experimental glassmaking collective VISSIO and the botanical perfumery Xinú, which launched its latest outpost in Tulum last year in collaboration with Slow. “Maybe it’s confusing for some people and seems a bit all over the place, but it’s a single effort,” said Héctor, even if his role or point of access is different in each project.

“I used to work more as a tailor and then I switched to working more as an orchestra director, but sometimes, in the case of MASA for example, I don’t direct; I just sit and collaborate. I play one instrument that makes a whole.” This variegated, ever-changing approach to his work connects in many ways to Héctor’s original eclectic interest in the world of design. “I think I’m doing the full spectrum today of the vision of that kid that didn’t know what to do, who wanted all those things happening at the same time,” said Héctor. “Now they’re happening.”

When we visited the studio, Héctor was working on pieces for the upcoming MASA show at Rockefeller Center, including sculptural Simbolo benches made of green onyx and a series of brass works inspired by the structure of vibrating sound waves. Like everything that Héctor designs, these new works link to Mexican heritage and artisanship but in an utterly unexpected, radically contemporary way. “I have never believed that we need to create this expectation of a stereotype expression of who we are as a culture,” said Héctor, whose embrace of this mentality has made him one of the leading figures of the current Mexican cultural revival.

“The creativity in Mexico is evolving in a way that has never happened before. We had Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and these cultural monsters that defined the shape of a nation, but I don’t know of a moment when the culinary scene with the architecture, with the design, with the art, were blooming in so many directions. When all the fields bloom, there’s something like a Renaissance happening,” said Héctor. “And the world is aware that there’s something different happening here.”

The cultural richness itself isn’t new, Héctor explained. “It has been here all the time. We just haven’t looked at it properly. As Mexicans, we tend to look outside for what is real or unique. But when we start to look inwards, we start to see the layers of a culture that is ancient and a culture has narrative and a culture that has history, and all those layers come from the cross-pollination of cultures,” Héctor continued.

“But if you have the vision of the Japanese, where they have the same rigor and the same passion, but they translate into new meanings, that is what’s happening now. We are looking back as the Japanese have done and creating a new dialogue and a new expression and a new translation—and no one gets offended that we are altering the heritage.”