The Armory Show: Presents 2025

Alejandro García Contreras

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present a solo presentation of Alejandro García Contreras for this year’s The Armory Show 2025, merging contemporary pop culture, Mexican folklore, ancient myth, and occult spirituality into a singular, visionary cosmology. Anchored by a monumental full-scale skeletal figure made entirely from ceramic, the presentation becomes a ceremonial site—an altar to desire, death, and the mystery of creation.

September 5th-September 7th

Javits Center, New York

The ceramic skeleton, both spectral and sacred, acts as the gravitational center of the booth. Evocative of both pre-Hispanic death gods and carnival calaveras, this totemic presence embodies Contreras’s syncretic practice—where life and afterlife, ecstasy and agony, collapse into a single narrative space. Meticulously hand-crafted, its surface pulses with symbolic detail: animal motifs, erotic fragments, spiritual sigils, anime echoes, and elemental markings. It is not a relic of death, but a body in perpetual becoming—a mythic archetype reborn through clay.

Born in Chiapas, Mexico, Contreras's work is informed by the layered cosmology of his homeland and a deeply inquisitive, global spiritual outlook. Shaped by his travels and studies—both formal and intuitive—he functions as both alchemist and shaman. His art draws from the entire course of civilization and channels an unfiltered flow of human consciousness. Whether referencing K-pop aesthetics, Catholic mysticism, or indigenous rituals, his work bridges truths across cultures and eras. The presentation at Armory also includes elaborately adorned ceramic vessels, each one densely layered with symbols of heaven and hell, sex and sanctity. These vessels—visually echoing Día de los Muertos and Carnival traditions—are populated with heroines who defy the male gaze and reclaim the power of their own desire. Male figures appear often as faceless spirits or demons, driven by yearning yet undone by it. The dynamic reflects Contreras’s broader meditation on instinct, vulnerability, and the cycles of pleasure and pain.

Inspired in part by Jacobo Grinberg’s Syntergic Theory, which posits that experience is born from the interaction between the brain’s energetic field and the Universe’s own structure, Contreras sees his art as a generator of connection—a portal into the liminal space where imagination, spirituality, and primal instinct converge. Much of the inspiration for this body of work stems from Contreras’s ongoing visits to the ancient Mayan city of Palenque, sparked by a formative gift from his grandfather: a book chronicling the entwined histories of art and the occult. The echoes of that place—and its metaphysical weight—resound through the skeletal figure and surrounding works. Through this ambitious presentation, Alejandro García Contreras offers more than an aesthetic encounter: he invites viewers into a living mythology. His vision urges us to embrace a new kind of spiritual universality—one born not from doctrine, but from the embrace of our infinite individualities.