Caracol II [Shell II]

The first female artist to create monumental public sculptures in Mexico City, Ángela Gurría played a pivotal role as a trailblazer in the history of Mexican civic art. To break into this male-dominated world, in the 1950s she adopted masculine pseudonyms such as “Ángel Gurría” and “Alberto Urías” to enter—and win—public sculpture competitions. Gurría became increasingly renowned for imbuing material experimentation with symbolic resonance. Caracol II is the second in a series of four small-scale Shell sculptures Gurría produced during the early 1980s. From afar, its graphic silhouette appears like a two-dimensional relief. A closer look reveals the creature’s three-dimensionality, which the artist emphasizes by adding strips of iron in shapes of waves along its sides, as if its shell had undulating, abstract gills. This artwork’s visual unfurling illustrates Gurria’s definition of sculpture as “an idea that uses form as the starting point for its own development, and space as the element in which the geometry of that idea is expressed.” Caracol II also demonstrates how she grounded her practice in Mexico’s ancient Mesoamerican heritage and visual cultures. To evoke Indigenous spiritual symbolism tied to land and sea snails, she abstracts the spiraling shell into a geometric symbol anchored in centuries of pre-conquest beliefs about life, death, rebirth, fertility, time, and the natural cycles of the cosmos. “My work is ever-changing, dispersed,” Gurría reflected years later, “although it always remains the same thing: the spiral of life.”