Felipe Ehrenberg: arriba y adelante
Baró Galeria
Felipe Ehrenberg
September - March 2026
In 1970, from three post offices in London, Felipe Ehrenberg sent to Mexico 200 hand-painted postcards as small fragments of a visual and political puzzle. With this gesture rooted in mail art, Ehrenberg appropriated the political campaign slogan of Luis Echeverría, “Arriba y adelante” (“Upwards and Onwards”). Each mailing was part of a collective work that, when later assembled at the Salón Independiente of the UNAM, revealed the silhouette of a woman holding a World Cup football while touching her breast.[1] This act of postal reappropriation questioned systems of propaganda, institutional control, and the symbolic use of nationalism, with an attitude that was at once ironic and deeply critical.
Felipe Ehrenberg: Upwards and Onwards is the first retrospective organized by Baró Galeria since the artist’s passing in 2017. Ehrenberg (Mexico City, 1943–2017) defined himself as a neologist rather than an artist, underscoring his will to invent words, meanings, and practices where none yet existed. Beyond labels, Ehrenberg was one of the key figures of conceptual and experimental art in Mexico and Latin America, distinguished by a radical practice that intertwined teaching, political activism, and constant experimentation.
His exile in the late 1960s was both a personal response to political violence in Mexico and an act of resistance that would define his practice forever. In 1968—an emblematic year for revolutionary movements across the globe—Mexico experienced a tragic turning point: just a week before the Olympic Games in Mexico City, military repression of a student demonstration left, by most accounts, hundreds dead. In this context, Ehrenberg chose to leave for England with his family to safeguard his freedom and continue his creative work. There, the encounter with conceptual art and Fluxus had a profound impact on his practice, fueling a search to reinvent ways of making, teaching, and resisting beyond the confines of the art object.
This exhibition brings together thirty years of production, ranging from performances and lived experiences to archival material, minimal gestures, and works on paper. Connected to the sensibility of displacement and travel, it unfolds through three lines of exploration: Journeys, Margins, and Resistances.
I. Journeys
"A journey is not only a change of place, but a way of rediscovering and reinventing oneself."[2]
Travel, in both its physical and conceptual dimensions, shaped Ehrenberg’s thought and artistic practice. Geographic displacement is not only a change of location, but an integral shift of perspective that allows one to see the immediate reality with new eyes. From this ever-curious gaze, his journeys between Mexico, Europe, and Latin America traced geographic routes, postal airmail lines, and vital trajectories.
A landmark work is The Tube-O-Nauts (1970), an action carried out with several collaborators in the London Underground. Wearing handmade cardboard astronaut helmets, they traveled through the subway system, exploring it as a performative and social space. In this action, documented in photographs and video, the daily commute was transformed into an aesthetic experiment that questioned the boundaries between art, life, and collective play. Also included is Caminata escultórica, escultura caminada (1982), an early example of urban walking as an aesthetic practice.
II. Margins
"Each word, each gesture, is a territory where battles for meaning and freedom are fought."[3]
What are the poetic and political possibilities of language? How do words and gestures shape reality? This section delves into Ehrenberg’s practices that work through subtlety, minimal gestures and, in many cases, the reappropriation of everyday materials. Works such as Your Name in Print (1971), a collage on cardboard made from magazine cuttings, and Desde from los mismos very extremos… (1989), a minimal intervention on a matchbox, show how the fragmentary and the ordinary can be re-signified to build alternative narratives from the periphery.
Among these subversive gestures, a standout is A Date with Fate at the Tate, in which Ehrenberg entered the museum with his head covered, claiming admission not as a visitor but as a work of art. The ensuing discussion with the guards, recorded on audio and later acquired by the Tate itself, completed the circular destiny announced in the title. In such questioning acts, Ehrenberg explored what could be re-signified through action at the margins.
III. Resistances
"To resist is to invent new ways of living and to face oppression with imagination."[4]
Ehrenberg understood art as a tool of resistance and social transformation, a means of intervening directly in reality. One of his main avenues was teaching: training artists, planting questions, and opening spaces for collective experimentation. But his practice was also defined by its radical challenge to the canon and to institutional centrality.
El arte según yo (Art According to Me, 1979) was a performance staged in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park and documented in pinhole photographs. Rather than writing a theoretical treatise on the definition of art, Ehrenberg chose to answer with an ephemeral gesture, in a public space and outside the museum. In doing so, he questioned institutional authority and redirected reflection toward relational experience. The work thus becomes a manifesto against the object-centered notion of art. For Ehrenberg, to resist was to reinvent not only the languages of art, but also the very ways of being and acting in the world.
Across these lines of exploration, Ehrenberg’s practice unfolds in all its complexity: his political commitment, his irony, his critical humor, and his readiness to destabilize certainties. In this sense, art could be nothing but radical: “To be radical is to be fundamental: we must listen to the present attentively, for it is the translator of the future.”[5] In today’s world—marked by violence, geopolitical conflict, and environmental crisis—it may be necessary to reclaim that neological vocation: to experiment with new words and new practices for an art inseparable from life and politics. It is never too late for neologisms.
[1] The resulting work was titled Obra Secretamente titulada Arriba y Adelante… y si no, pues también [Work Secretly Titled Upwards and Onwards… and if not, then also].
[2] Interview with Felipe Ehrenberg, Art Nexus, no. 19, 1994.
[3] Interview with Felipe Ehrenberg, Cuadernos de Arte, Revista de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), 1987.
[4] Ehrenberg, Felipe. Lecture at the International Colloquium on Art and Politics, Mexico, 1990.
[5] Ehrenberg, Felipe. “Las acusaciones son infundadas pero no pueden pasar sin respuesta” [“The accusations are unfounded but cannot go unanswered”], Cuadernos de Comunicación, July 1976.