Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler:

Flora

Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler’s Flora is based on the artists’ discoveries about an unknown American artist, Flora Mayo, with whom the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti had a love affair in Paris in the 1920s. While Giacometti is one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century, Mayo’s oeuvre was destroyed when she left Paris in the 1930s and her biography reduced to a footnote in Giacometti scholarship.

With this work, Hubbard and Birchler combine their historical research with memories of Flora Mayo’s son, David (now in his eighties), whose understanding of his mother’s past wistfully came to life for him only through their discoveries and conversations. Utilizing her letters and diaries to create a re-enactment of her life and art in the 1920s-30s, the artists’ filmmaking unearths an important story of the personal sacrifices and sometimes insurmountable bias and financial deprivation female creatives faced in that era.

Touted as one of the most emotionally engaging exhibitions at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Flora will travel to MCA Denver, where the original exhibition will be complemented by additional material providing insight into Flora Mayo’s childhood and early adult years in Denver. It will include a double-sided film, a recreation of Mayo’s lost bust of Giacometti (captured in the one photograph that launched the artists’ research), a photograph to accompany this sculpture, as well as additional photographs and letters that piece together her early life in Denver, thus connecting her story to the place of the exhibition. The work succeeds as a poignant conversation between Flora Mayo and her son, while also generating a multifaceted dialogue between Mayo and Giacometti, Paris and Los Angeles, and past and present.