Ulises Carrión


Ulises Carrión, considered as "perhaps Mexico’s most important conceptual artist", is widely known for his decisive role in defining and conceptualising the artistic genre artists' book through his manifest The New Art of Making Books. But his alertness and interest in new forms of art and innovative operations implicated that he was active in most of the artistic fields of his time. The activities cover artworks, theory and independent initiatives. This includes not only a great number of bookworks - as he named artists' books - and unique artworks, but also performances, alongside film, video, and sound works, as well as several edition, publishing, and curating projects, a couple of considerable public projects, and various significant works and initiatives within the international community of mail artists during its most creative period. Equally essential for his artistic career is his engagement in several artists' run spaces. All his artistic activities were reflected by him in highly elaborated theories.

Career

Carrión was born in San Andres Tuxtla, Veracruz, Mexico in 1941. After studying philosophy and literature at the National University of Mexico, he started his career as a successful and respected young writer. In 1964 he received a grant for further studies at the Sorbonne Paris, France. Short after he went for studies to the Goethe Institute, Achenmühle, Germany, and to Leeds, England, where he studied English language and literature at the University and graduated with a diploma. In 1972 he definitively settled in Amsterdam, an open and cosmopolitan city with a lot of artistic innovation and international exchanges. Here he became co-founder and member of the In-Out Center. In 1975, he founded Other Books and So, the first space of its kind devoted to all kind of artists’ publications, which in 1979 became the Other Books And So Archive. He was also the co-founder of the Vereniging van Videokunstenaars, later Time Based Arts in Amsterdam, NL. Ulises Carrión died in 1989 in Amsterdam.

Recent Reception

Due to a certain cult of the overlooked and underestimated1960s avant-garde, Ulises Carrión has undergone an extraordinary appreciation in a few years. Exhibitions of his works and a flood of references to his artistic strategies and theories in current art works, essays, conferences, as well as newly annotated, listed, translated, and edited works give proof of the widespread reception today. The widespread reception of his manifesto The New Art of Making Books made him the central reference for the definition of the concept of the artist book. Also his bookshop gallery Other Books and So became, despite its short duration, a mythologized paragon. In particular in Latin America, Ulises Carrión is received for some time as an important conceptual compatriot.

Exhibitions