ZONA MACO 5 - 9 February 2025 Mexico City, Mexico Booth EJ22 Tobias Thaens & Alan Hernández
No Man’s Art Gallery is honored to debut at Zona Maco, Mexico City, the leading art fair for Latin America, presenting a duo booth by Tobias Thaens and Alan Hernández. In the emerging EJES section, both artists explore rhythms within the aesthetics of nature and poetry through the mediums of painting and textile.
Alan Hernández (b. 1992, MX) based in Oaxaca, Mexico is known for his self-referential work that contains a certain political charge and humor. He graduated in plastic and visual arts at the Benito Juárez autonomous university of Oaxaca, U.A.B.J.O and studied at the art faculties of the UNAM and the U.A.E.M. His production focuses on intricate textile and bead techniques that trace back to crafts from his region, which are transformed to installations and immersive scenographies. Through this, he explores concepts as the body, gender, race, sexuality and identity. His knowledge of the various textile crafts is inspired and enforced by his mother, who was a seamstress herself. Hernández uses his artisthood as a means to rethink his role as a (queer) male within society. His processes start from a central idea and unconsciously these ideas are nuanced and transformed along with the formality of the piece to generate sculptural objects with phallic and organic shapes drawn from nature and the human body.
Tobias Thaens (b. 1999, NL) based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is a painter who graduated with a Bachelor
of Fine Arts at the AKI Academy for Art & Design, Enschede, in 2021 and completed his residency at De Ateliers,
Amsterdam, in 2023. Thaens’ paintings offer the artist’s reflections on
the hard contrasts between form and function, which dissolve into one
another uninterrupted, revealing the fluidity of existence and the
interconnectedness of distinct energies.
Through a deep fascination with animals utilising camouflage, the artist
brings to light a shared visual language of organisms within an
ecosystem, where colours and shapes follow each other and the
agency they hold changes over time. An androgynous world where
nature dynamically alters its skin pattern and colour, a series of
perceptive and emotional depths lay ahead. This exploration bleeds out
into the intimate experience, blurring the line between biology and
poetics. Through this permeation, Thaens instils in the viewer a lasting
curiosity for the discourse of perception and interpretation.