Robert Janitz: Anahuacalli

The Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City, a pyramid-shaped structure of volcanic stone, was intended to be the final mansion of Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo. Today, it houses Rivera's vast collection of pre-Columbian art. Unlike typical museums, the building's galleries resemble religious or ceremonial chambers, and the corridors are dramatic and cavernous. In 2022, artist Robert Janitz (b. 1962 in Alsfeld, Germany), who had recently moved to Mexico City from New York, was invited to exhibit his work at Anahuacalli. This catalog documents this extraordinary dialogue between pre-Hispanic and contemporary aesthetics. As an outsider, Janitz was free to respond to what he found compelling at Anahuacalli: the colors, the textures, the visionary architecture. Throughout the museum's three floors, Janitz installed large-scale paintings on the walls, even the ceiling and floor, to amplify and distort Rivera's almost ubiquitous decorative program. His paintings of tubular structures, halfway between hieroglyphs and shapes, were spotlit against the heavy, dark stone walls, giving them a jewel-like luminosity and creating an almost metaphysical and spiritual experience. Conceptually and chromatically, Anahuacalli seemed the perfect home for Janitz's extravagantly colored silhouettes.