Milena Muzquiz: Make or Break. Various Others 2026 in collaboration with Travesía Cuatro

For Various Others 2026, Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle presents Milena Muzquiz's solo exhibition ‘Make or Break’, conceived in collaboration with Travesía Cuatro (Madrid, Guadalajara, Mexico City). The exhibition offers a concentrated insight into the complexity of Muzquiz's practice uniting her ceramic works and oil paintings.
Born in Mexico and living in Los Angeles, Muzquiz locates the origins of her imagery in the visual landscape of Tijuana, a border town characterised by tourism, trade and cultural overlaps. Beaches, flowers, lucky charms and fragments of decorative displays – motifs familiar from souvenir shops – form less a fixed iconography than a starting point. In both her paintings and ceramics, these elements are distorted, layered and reassembled, undermining the seductive simplicity of their source images. What at first appears playful or ornamental gradually reveals a more complex terrain in which the constructed promise of paradise encounters ecological pressures, cultural projections and personal memory.
In a fluid transition between painting and sculpture, Muzquiz treats objects and images as mutable forms. Her ceramic vessels—vaguely reminiscent of vases or decorative containers—evolve into sculptural bodies that oscillate between functional use and character figures. In an additive process of modelling, glazing and painterly interventions, surfaces emerge that accumulate textures, protrusions and gestural traces and elude formal stability. Instead of condensing into unambiguous symbols, these forms remain deliberately exuberant and unstable, moving between ornament, figuration and theatrical prop.
Floral motifs recur throughout the exhibition – both as decorative elements and as triggers of memory. Painted with gestural directness or emerging from ceramic surfaces, they evoke landscapes that are at once remembered, imagined and culturally mediated. By drawing on the visual codes of kitsch, craftsmanship and popular decoration, Muzquiz develops a visual language that is deliberately seductive and at the same time constantly unsettling – an imagery in which sensual surface and structural dissonance are in constant tension with each other.