The wallpapered room is filled with antiques and a menagerie of blinged-out taxidermy. A 24-foot-long banquet table has been set up, but the guests appear to have disappeared, leaving their coats behind. On the table: nucleated eyeballs nestled in golden spoons, miniature torsos on cake stands, and baby Kewpie dolls trapped in red dough, like candied desserts. A glass “capitalist pig,” one of many secular centerpieces, smiles as it defecates gold coins.
The banquet, an installation called “The Tipping Point” at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, is visually stunning and also a little off-putting — and that’s the point. “This opulence repels us,” said one of its creators, Einar de la Torre. “But we also think, ‘Gosh, I wish I was invited to that party.'”
Brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre create mixed media works of dazzling complexity. Using disparate materials including blown glass, mass-produced trinkets, resin castings and photocollages, the siblings, who have collaborated artistically since the 1990s, construct richly detailed, mandala-like installations; lenticular prints that shimmer and explode with movement; and color-saturated glass sculptures inlaid with everyday objects like dominoes, coins and doll parts.
Pre-Columbian deities, Mexican lucha libre wrestlers, Olmec heads, Slavic water spirits, de la Torres’ visual universe is vast and pantheistic. The brothers freely mix high and low, in part, they say, to challenge entrenched ideas about beauty and “good taste.”
“In college, there was a lot of minimalism,” Einar, the youngest sibling, recalled during a recent interview at their studio in Baja California, Mexico. “We asked ourselves: how are we going to succeed in the art world, which wants to distill everything down to the bone? We are a bit of the opposite. We wanted to add more meaning.
Two current exhibitions take the brothers’ maximalist vision further. “Collidoscope,” their traveling retrospective, featuring 40 mixed-media works, will run at the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York — where the brothers recently resided — through early 2025.
“Upward Mobility,” at the McNay Art Museum through September 15, includes, in “The Rocking Point,” their first chandeliers — anthropomorphic objects with human arms holding up broken beer bottles, signaling that “the masses are out with torches. » said Einar.
In another gallery, two oversized lenticular works underscore the exhibition’s heavy themes—excessive consumption and climate apocalypse—with dark humor and kaleidoscopic exuberance. They began experimenting with lenticular printing, a revolutionary 3D printing technique, in the late 2000s, attracted by the format’s ability to contain many images in a single image. “Coatzilla,” a lenticular print from the McNay Art Museum that the brothers liken to a monster movie poster, depicts the Aztec earth mother goddess Coatlicue as a two-headed Godzilla-like creature. She walks through downtown Mexico City in disintegration, “grumpy,” Einar explained, because humanity has ravaged the world it created.
In “Miclantiputin,” another lenticular, Russian President Vladimir Putin is fused with the lantern-jawed Aztec god Mictlantecuhtli. Ribbons of congested highways sprout from the hybrid monster’s ribcage, and its fingers are intercontinental missiles. In the small black gallery where the posters hang, a projector projects images of traffic on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma onto the ground, encouraging visitors to reenact their own monstrous destruction on the capital by stomping on the ground, a commentary on the humanity’s monstrous impulse toward destruction. The de la Torre brothers unleash the narrative possibilities of the lenticular – often seen as an object of glittering playing cards and prayer cards – and its hypnotic qualities.
“Many artistic people, not just glass artists, have told me that the brothers have had a significant impact on their artistic practice after seeing them demonstrate or teach in various places around the world,” said Tami Landis, conservative. postwar and contemporary glass at the Corning Museum of Glass.
Recently, working with Corning Glass Artists, the brothers produced dozens of new glass pieces for a mandala-like installation commissioned by the museum. The completed, as-yet-untitled work, which will be unveiled there in November, “will have a big impact on the museum’s galleries,” Landis said.
“They’re pushing not only the medium of glass, but also the medium of sculpture itself,” Landis added. “They’re pushing things by thinking in terms of multiple layers, which certainly wasn’t something you saw as much in glass in the early ’80s and ’90s.”
Learn from Godzilla
Born to a Mexican father and a Danish-Mexican mother in the early 1960s in Guadalajara, western Mexico, the de la Torre brothers attended Colegio Cervantes, an all-boys Roman Catholic school, where they remember watching Godzilla. Einar, 60, is the most talkative; Jamex, 64 years old, the polite and imperturbable older brother. Their father was a gifted but troubled architect, “extremely charming to his friends and colleagues” but “monstrous” to his family when he drank, Jamex said. In 1972, when he was 12 and Einar was 8, their parents separated and their mother took the boys to live with extended family in Southern California.
The culture shock was startling, but also “wonderful,” Jamex said. Their mother was a certified translator, a wordsmith with a gift for limericks. From her, they inherited a love of wordplay (evident in the brothers’ titles, often featuring portmanteaus or Spanglish puns) and her sense of cultural fluidity, favoring them a foreign insight into Mexican and American cultures.
They both studied glassblowing at California State University, Long Beach, falling in love with the plasticity and immediacy of the medium, as well as the intense collaborative spirit the work demands in a “hot workshop” on the part of glass artists. They found a mentor in the studio of glass artist Therman Statom, learning from him the craft of an artist – the details of running a studio and juggling public art projects. Very early on, they developed an agnostic view of labels, neither courting nor rejecting them. “As a young artist, you ask yourself: are you a craftsman? Are you a conceptual artist? Are you Mexican? Are you american? A Chicano? » said Einar. “At some point we realized that the less we worried about it, the better.”
“Glittering rubble” of destroyed works
Before pursuing art full-time, the brothers operated a small glassmaking business in Los Angeles for over a decade, creating custom pieces for museums and crystal shops. They booked their first solo gallery show in 1994, 30 years ago this year, at the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco. In 1995, the unthinkable happened when their solo exhibition at the MACLA art space in San Jose, dedicated to Latino and Chicano culture, was vandalized. Two years of work have been reduced to pieces. Nearly three decades later, they remember that day in surreal detail, including the police sergeant who cried upon seeing the glistening rubble of their shattered work.
Since the 1990s, the brothers have lived and worked on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, traveling once or twice a week between San Diego and their “home base,” a small ranch adjoining the main highway in El Valle de Guadalupe, Baja. They remember El Valle before it became known as Mexico’s wine country, before the profusion of trendy restaurants, wine barrel-shaped rental cabins and glamping tents now draped permanently across its hills.
In the summer, the main road is so clogged with tourist traffic that it’s difficult to leave the ranch, Einar told me during a tour of the property. In late spring, as peak season dawns, the highway is relatively quiet and the ranch’s winding trails are dotted with flowering wild artichokes. The brothers are in their studio preparing for an upcoming residency. They travel throughout the year and are in high demand as guest artists at premier glass art programs like Pilchuck in Washington State. Their studio is cavernous and bright, with red brick, glass walls, and cathedral ceilings designed to frame the property’s large, sprawling oak tree.
Rolling cabinets are filled with spray paint and adhesives. Industrial shelves are filled with dozens of plastic containers, a quirky and ever-expanding archive of material culture: doll parts, ceramic statuettes, plastic insects. Einar frequents a flea market in South San Diego, looking for “carefully chosen” items (a description he prefers “found objects”). The balls are as important to their work as any finely crafted sheet of glass.
In their conversations, they oscillate between disparate topics: the dismal state of arts funding in Mexico, the crumbling firewall between the worlds of fine arts and crafts, what fun it would be to one day put together a exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. . The brothers do not finish each other’s sentences but speak in shorthand. The ease of exchange between the two is remarkable, and it quickly becomes apparent why a former student once described them as “idea machines.”
“They rebel in a very militant way against the idea of the solitary artist, painting alone, solitary and alienated in his attic or his studio,” producer and director Isaac Artenstein told me. “They are the complete opposite.” Artenstein worked on a documentary about the siblings, titled “De la Torre Brothers: Artists on the Line.”
He recently spent an afternoon filming them at Art-Hell, the glassblowing studio inside Bread & Salt, an arts center in San Diego’s Barrio Logan neighborhood, where the brothers have a satellite studio . “I really don’t know any other artists like them in the United States,” Artenstein said. “The level of work they do, the complexity, the sense of humor.”
“It’s overwhelming, but in a wonderful way.”