Friendship, as Myriam Ben Salah has pointed out, is not a stable state. Like the works in this exhibition, the second between Mexico City-based MASA and New York City-based Luhring Augustine, friendship is a choice made freely: which allows the contours of the individual and our distinct interests — whether institutional or personal — to embrace an identification, even admiration or affection, with someone considered other than oneself.

Across three rooms of MASA’s historic space in Mexico City are installed a trio of pairings of artists – Pipilotti Rist and Alma Allen; Eva LeWitt and Hector Esrawe; and Diego Singh and Renata Petersen. Although there are affinities between the works, the dialogues between artists from Mexico and their international counterparts are associative rather than didactic, and unexpected encounters among recognizable idiosyncrasies arise. In the work of Rist and Allen is a shared engagement with inner visions, collective consciousness, and extra-sensory perception; an interest in translating into the material dreams that are once fantastical and familiar. Similarly, both LeWitt and Esrawe exist in a space between lightness and architecture, manipulating industrial materials into installations in which granular element expand into a view, a horizon, or a cosmos. The Guadalajara-based Renata Petersen and the Argentina-born Diego Singh present here works in completely different mediums — blown glass and painting, respectively — and yet both approach figuration with obfuscation, imbuing a transcendental space with a libidinal crackle, the unabashedly human.

MASA x Luhring Augustine: Vol. 2 is open until March 29, 2025.