Nuevo [New]

For three weeks in August 2003, Vidokle painted this abstract mural on the Salto del agua metro station in Mexico City. The artist picked a ubiquitous example of unloved 1960s architecture, and transformed it into a time-based constructivist composition. Mexico City is best known for its heroic figurative murals; Vidokle takes the other language of 20th-century utopianism, Russian Constructivism, and places it onto this functional building. The brash red color is charged with revolutionary overtones. In this work, Vidokle asks the viewer to consider how the apparently universal meanings of abstraction can be changed by different contexts.