Los dos amigos

Los dos amigos documents an eighteen-year collaboration between the Mexican artists Abraham Cruzvillegas and Dr. Lakra, assembled less as a conventional exhibition catalog than as a shared scrapbook of two overlapping creative lives.

Published in 2006 by A&R Press with the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, the hardcover volume accompanied the artists' first public two-person exhibition, held at MACO in May 2005. Its pages reproduce raw material pulled directly from both artists' source files: magazine clippings, snapshots, posters, fanzines, flyers, found street objects, packaging, correspondence, and personal diaries, tracing an exchange of images built up over two decades rather than presenting finished works in isolation.

Cruzvillegas (b. 1968, Mexico City) works across sculpture and installation under the banner of autoconstrucción, an improvisational building logic drawn from his childhood neighborhood his work has appeared at Tate Modern, dOCUMENTA (13), and the Venice Biennale. Dr. Lakra (Jerónimo López Ramírez, b. 1972) trained alongside him in Gabriel Orozco's Taller de los Viernes workshop and built a tattoo-derived collage and painting practice mining ethnographic photography and pulp ephemera. The two have kept collaborating as Los dos amigos since, including a mezcal-bottle series shown at kurimanzutto.