ARCO MADRID 2013
Pabellón 10, Stand 10G14

Honor Fraser is pleased to present a solo installation by Mario Ybarra Jr. for the ARCO International Contemporary Art Fair in Madrid, Spain from February 13-17, 2013.

...like a cow visiting a butchershop... transforms a contemporary art fair booth into an old-fashioned meat market. Inspired by Victorian-era toy butcher shops, miniature play sets reproducing stores and their wares for children's amusement, Ybarra Jr. returns the model market to a fanciful life-size version in which the cuts of meat are the art for sale. This stage set for the business of the fair wryly highlights the artist's vulnerable position as a creator of a commodity in the retail stream that is the international art exposition.

In many ways, this work shares sensibilities with his 2007 installation Sweeney Tate at the Tate Modern in London. There, Ybarra Jr. created a functional barber shop modeled on the temporary experimental exhibition and event space New Chinatown Barbershop in Los Angeles; the Tate version was an exaggerated rendering of the original space, designed to function like a stage set where a myriad of activities, exchanges and staged scenarios could take place throughout the run of the exhibition. The booth-as-butcher shop, similarly hyperbolic with elements of the cartoon, uses artifice and metaphor to set the stage for the exchanges between dealers and fair-goers.

In the spirit of Claes Oldenburg's Store, the booth will include a series of colorful butcher shop signs, including a happy mascot pig with crossed cleavers; various "cuts of meat," painted and upholstered; a butcher's table; wallpaper reminiscent of a colorful version of newsprint used for wrapping wares for customers. The booth will also feature a music video for the butcher shop theme song in which an unsuspecting customer and butcher are surprised by the meat reassembling and coming back to life, a sly way for the artist to perhaps get the last laugh in the transaction.

Mario Ybarra Jr. (b. 1972) lives and works in Wilmington, CA. He received an MFA from the University of California at Irvine and a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Double Feature, currently on view at Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles; Mario Ybarra Jr.: The Tio Collection at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum; Wilmington Good at Cardi Black Box in Milan, Italy; Silver and Blacks at Michael Janssen Gallery, Berlin; and Take Me Out...No Man Is An Island at the Art Institute of Chicago. Ybarra was included in the recent Made in L.A., organized by the Hammer Museum and LAXART, Los Angeles; Invisible Cities at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid, Spain; the 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York; The World as a Stage at the Tate Modern in London and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, CA; and Alien Nation at the Institute of Contemporary Art London. Ybarra Jr. was one of the founding members of the collective Slanguage, a socially engaged group of artists that comingles art education, community building and the production of interactive exhibition and performance projects. He organized Possible Worlds at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in collaboration with Karla Diaz and Slanguage Studio. Ybarra Jr. is the recent recipient of a Levitt fellowship at Williams College in Massachusetts; a residency at Artpace in San Antonio, TX; and, in 2011, was the artist-in-residence at the Arhus Kunstbygning Centre for Contemporary Art in Denmark.