Half Blood Princess a solo exhibition at PEANA; Monterrey, MX.

ASMA: a collaborative process resulting in hybrid and polluted forms materially and conceptually

ASMA is an artist duo based in Mexico City, formed by Matias Armendaris (Ecuador b. 1990) and Hanya Beliá (México b. 1994). Their work uses allegorical figures and architectural spaces exploring formal interrelations between painterly and sculptural expressions. They employ fictional narratives which include forms of nature interwoven with psychoaffective contemporary landscapes. As a result of a collaborative process the work focuses on hybrid and polluted forms both in a material and conceptual nature.

Las cosas suceden de forma silenciosa, PEANA & Labor; Mexico City, MX.

“ASMA has a practice of seemingly cosmic scope; the duo’s works behave as if foreign to our everyday reality, having recently arrived from a weirder, more poetic dimension. The artists amalgamate materials, techniques, and aesthetics to birth something that is eerie, ethereal, and very much their own. These objects can denature a room just by virtue of being there.”

- Gaby Cepeda, Artforum

Video courtesy of ASMA

ASMA’s work resorts to mythology, psychological literature, popular culture and alternative futures from which, employing their contrasting formal language, they conceive a series of hybrid characters in scenarios and situations endowed with strong symbolism.

Things Happen in a Silent Way presented in 2021 composed by a series of silicon paintings in bas relief that revolve around the image of an anthropomorphic rose, the works portray this character inhabiting renditions of the romantic cliché of which this particular flower is typically a partaker. Through the construction of this fantasy-induced realm, a psychological space is materialized, where bodies of vegetal-insectoid forms represent human intimacies from the sexual-affective imagination of adolescence, all while the animist language of the relief proposes an internal world framed by objects that evoke a real, domestic, industrial and utilitarian space.

A hanging sculpture titled Posción Multijugos presented as part of Otrxs Mundxs at Museo Tamayo in 2020 alongside Fantasia 3000 and Stranger Reflecting Mammals, where the recurrent natural motifs portray a polluted version of nature, escaping the traditional conception of purity that is commonly associated with it. Taking into consideration artificial materiality and contrasting it with a natural appearance and organic forms.