La Jornada: Gerda Gruber received the Fine Arts Medal at the MAM, “key” in her career

“Oh, my God, what emotion!” exclaimed the sculptor Gerda Gruber upon receiving the Fine Arts Medal in Visual Arts 2026 on Wednesday night, the highest award granted by the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (Inbal).

The recognition – which, according to what he admitted to reporters, he had not expected – was given to him at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) as a corollary of the inauguration of Gerda Gruber: Between green and water, show that highlights the artist’s reflection on regenerative energy, memory and the relationship between art and the environment.

Enthusiastic and with a full smile, the creator, born in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 1940, and living in Mexico since 1975, thanked those who filled the Paseo de la Reforma venue for the award, including family, friends, colleagues and students.

“I am very grateful to receive this recognition,” said Gruber, and then recalled that exactly 50 years ago that same museum housed an exhibition of her sculptural work in porcelain, which she described as “key and the beginning of her teaching in contemporary sculpture modeling mud and clay, beginning at (the Academy of) San Carlos.”

She said that this project spread throughout Mexico thanks to the fact that her students came from different entities, and added that her cultural, geographical and ideological investigations took her “to the heat” of Yucatán, where she has lived since the late 1980s: “despite the fact that visually it is an arid land, I discovered that it is quite fertile and that it can live between green and water.”

At the ceremony, the director of Inbal, Alejandra de la Paz, read a message from the head of the federal Ministry of Culture (SC), Claudia Curiel de Icaza, in which she recognized Gruber’s importance in the national artistic scene, both for his creative and teaching work.

“Since its creation, the Fine Arts Medal recognizes trajectories that have left a deep mark on the artistic life of Mexico. This is, without a doubt, the case of Gerda Gruber, who marked a decisive transformation in contemporary sculpture in Mexico: the recovery of clay as a current artistic language, the training of new generations and the construction of a profound relationship between creation, matter and nature.”

Curiel de Icaza recalled that, upon arriving in Mexico in the 1970s, Gruber found that many young generations no longer worked with clay, despite its historical importance. “Faced with that, she installed a basic kiln, opened a ceramics workshop and converted that space into an experimentation laboratory. Gerda did not turn to clay as a material of the past, but as a language of the present,” he noted.

Likewise, she praised her work in Yucatán, where she was co-founder of the Higher School of Arts, today the University of the Arts. “Her career demonstrates that artistic teaching not only transmits techniques, but also sensitivity, discipline and thought,” concluded the head of the SC.

Organic vision

Gerda Gruber: Between green and water, which will remain at the MAM until September 13, more than a chronological retrospective, it is an approach to five decades of permanent creation.

The exhibition, the result of a collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art (Marco) of Monterrey, brings together 112 works that include installations, drawings, models and pieces made of clay, porcelain, henequen, bronze, cotton, bamboo, glass and tamarind, almond and walnut wood, among other materials.

After clarifying that it is a different exhibition from the one presented in Monterrey, by integrating new and recent pieces, curator Daniela Pérez explained during a tour prior to the opening the axis that articulates Gruber’s work, marked by a deeply organic vision in conceptual and material terms.

“The exhibition is not chronological, but rather responds to the artist’s understanding of space. The circle and the ellipse are constant in her work because they are the shape of the seed, the eye, the Mayan canoe, the uterus: spaces that protect life,” she said.

The art historian highlighted key pieces such as a series of time capsules that contain collections of seeds endemic to Yucatán, embroidered with their names in Mayan, Latin and Spanish, as well as the project Magnetic field, a social intervention in a public school in Cholul, Yucatán, where Gruber planted 60 trees nine years ago to offer shade to students.

“She does not separate her artistic practice from teaching and community action. Her work infiltrates public schools without students knowing that they live with a work of art. That is her greatest generosity,” said Pérez, who also showed the piece water illusion, temporary intervention in the museum’s sculptural courtyard that replicates the water troughs that the artist places in her garden for birds, bees and butterflies during the hottest season in Yucatan.

Nature, a refuge

After receiving the medal and assuming that “no recognition can be won alone,” Gruber extended it to her students, friends and the artistic community that has accompanied her since her arrival in Mexico.

In a collective interview, the artist delved into her creative philosophy and one of the hallmarks of her work: her relationship with nature. Asked what she would recommend to young people who want to follow the path of sculpture, she highlighted the patience required to learn the trade.

“You lose patience, not the craft. This is a tool, but you can overcome it and you can be fabulous. We have in Mexico a range of exemplary artisans; the student must be inspired by the technology and traditions left by the ancestors.”

Regarding the link between her work and the environmental crisis, she clarified that nature is a kind of refuge for her: “when you decide where to live, you analyze down to the leaf and the root, how they function. I look for the internal structures of the vegetation. A leaf without the green has a network of tissue; we see the same thing in our bones. I began to assimilate that what we live in our environment is similar to us.”

When talking about his current work, he revealed that he is studying leaf litter, an element that apparently only serves to fertilize the earth: “I really like how it transforms into a spiral shape and the way in which these shapes search for each other.”