Organized every four years by Carnegie Museum of Art, the Carnegie International is the longest-running exhibition of international art in North America. Abraham González Pacheco participates in this new edition organized by Ryan Inouye, Danielle A. Jackson, and Liz Park, the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curators, with Orogenic (2026), a series of murals commissioned for the Forbes Entrance of the museum.
Abraham González Pacheco’s murals function as fictitious archaeological devices and containers memory. The production process of these works—made with concrete, metal, and pigments—involves a loss of control over the image, whose outcome is revealed as an iconographic system, where its qualities are transformed by the conditions of an imagined yet proximate time.
Created for the 59th Carnegie International, this work consists of six murals comprising a total of 287 panels. The images present in each, emerge from the artist’s encounter with the galleries of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History: not only with the items they house, but also with the attitude of preservation, characteristic of these major institutions worldwide, which safeguard within their collections objects originating from all latitudes.
“After my first visit to the museum, these visions materialized for me as a whirlwind of archaeological elements. I imagined the remnants of a civilization that destroyed itself—a fiction very close to the times we are living through. The chaos that governs this set of images evokes the false idea of ownership that we, as humans, have in relation to territory, landscape, and the ground we walk on; nothing is eternal, and we are no exception. Through their speculative nature, these murals imagine a message from the future—ruins that might be displayed in 100 or 300 years within a museum erected to safeguard identities and memories. What will the museums of the future treasure?”
The compositions that structure the murals depict archaeological pieces, fragments of ruins, ceremonial objects, or animal forms that appear to be held together by a delicate order of forces and natural elements. In dialogue with the museum’s structure—both architectural and symbolic—these works seek to subvert the traditional notion of muralism, in which painting is embodied in the wall. Here, they function instead as second skins, shifting and adapting—covering, in this case, the historic Carnegie building. They were conceived as a geological landscape connected to both ground and sky, in a process of constant transformation.
“The world has shed its surface many times; it is a cyclical phenomenon that can even be observed in one of the areas of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. In the face of a climate of crisis and uncertainty that is perceptible at a collective and global level, we need messages from the future that point to possible directions forward.”
– Abraham González Pacheco