Performance
2023

During the opening of the exhibition Freddie artist Freddie Mercado performed a unique, one-off performance amid the audience and his own paintings. During the performance Elementos y Carnicería, the artist, dressed in rattling and colorful costumes, humorously played with the audience and his various forms of identity. Mercado looks for the tension in the self-portrait and in this performance, he showed the conflict between and fluidity of the many versions of the self.

After the opening, Freddie was still present, not in the flesh but in the form of his painted self-portraits and a pile of magnificent clothes and artifacts he used during the performance. His voice also resonated through the space, mimicking the grunting of a pig or singing high like an opera singer.

On 30 August, part two of this exhibition opened. The first part presented 22 paintings, all self-portraits, combined with the remnants of the unique performance that Mercado did during the opening of the exhibition. The second part presents, next to the series of paintings, five sculptural iterations of the artist’s self, temporarily solidified. We invite you to come and get to know him, and perhaps even find –somewhere between alienation and recognition– another version of yourself, too.