Felipe Ehrenberg

Mexico 1943–2017

Paraíso is pleased to pay tribute to Felipe Ehrenberg, a pioneering Mexican artist, activist and neologist whose visionary practice spanned mail art, performance, installation and artist publishing. A restless and radical figure, Ehrenberg embraced unorthodox media as tools for political and cultural resistance, and his founding of Beau Geste Press remains a landmark moment in the history of independent artist publishing. Decades ahead of his time, his work deserves to be rediscovered and celebrated as a foundational chapter in the story of postmodern art.”

His formative early projects were linked to the Fluxus movement, and he was an innovator of independent artists’ publishing, cofounding the influential Beau Geste Press with Martha Hellion and David Mayor in England in 1968. He was subsequently involved in Mexico’s grupos movement as a founding member of the artist collective Grupo Proceso Pentágono, alongside Carlos Finck, José Antonio Hernández Amezcua, and Victor Muñoz. At turns acutely political, experimental, and personal, Ehrenberg’s practice as an artist was inextricable from his role as a cultural agent, teacher, writer, and publisher. His work is in the collections of the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; among many others.