Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor (2026): Colegio de San Ildefonso, Ciudad de México, México
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About the exhibition
Taking as its starting point four works from the Amparo and Manuel Foundation Collection—Emotive Title, Wormery, Weepers, and Plague Flowers (2018)—the exhibition explores artistic creation as a means of processing trauma, grief, and vulnerability.
Through semi-autobiographical narratives, Penny Goring’s work confronts austerity, misogyny, discrimination, and control, transforming the individual experience into an open reflection on pain and resistance.
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Curatorial statement
‘Everything I have ever done has been centred on feelings. It’s easier to communicate emotions by inventing shapes that show how it feels.’
Penny Goring (b. 1962, London) makes work that stems from her personal processing of trauma, experiences of violence, and the emotions associated with states of grief, fear, loss, panic and powerlessness. She works freely across mediums, her paintings, drawings, poetry, collages and sculpture include repeated words and images taken from her own life, as well as history and contemporary culture. Concerned with challenging the conditions of making and exhibiting, Goring works with materials cheaply available to her such as ball point pens, fabric and food dye – and free computer programmes such as Microsoft Paint. Her use of these materials reflects the uncertainty and anxiety that saturates her art.
Goring continually returns to the female form. Her portraits feature figures falling apart in each other’s arms – sisters, lovers, wives, enemies, friends – are often pictured as distorted and fragmented, intermingling sex and violence to create an atmosphere of hysteria, deprivation and mutilation. Much of Goring’s work features her two alter egos amidst violent, dystopian landscapes populated by severed heads, plague flowers, ominous storms, wounded horses and melting trees. Across her work Goring creates a semi-autobiographical narratives that explores austerity, misogyny, discrimination and control. Her emblematic works reflect a contemporary condition in which violence is structural and commonplace. The artist’s often life-size doll sculptures also enact a position of self-portraiture in varying extreme emotional states. Goring’s dolls perform feelings brought on by loss and illness. They simultaneously attest to the consequences of habitual violence, as well as offering protective qualities.
The title of the exhibition Unloving Love is taken from one of Goring’s unpublished poems, as well as being the title of a drawing presented in the exhibition. Simultaneously personal and universal, the title reflects ideas around love, heartbreak, power dynamics, and loss. An adjective and a verb, ‘unloving’ could describe both an inadequate relationship as well as the active pursuit to ‘unlove’ love. As such, it begins to dissolve a binary position between loving and not. -
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Installation views
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Artworks
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Videos
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Documentary about the installation process
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City Read more -
Amparo and Manuel Foundation's artworks
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City Read more
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Poetic documentary about the details of the works
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City Read more -
Interview with Laura Smith, curator
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City Read more
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Interview with Rozsa Farkas
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City Read more -
Public's interaction with the exhibition
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City Read more
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Interview with the visitors
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City Read more -
Guided tour with Laura Smith, curator of the show
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City Read more
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Opening
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City Read more -
Documentary about "El Volador" workshop
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City Read more
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Events
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Opening program
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City 7 February 2026 -
Fanzinavigation: A Workshop on Emotional Cartography Through Fanzines
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City 28 February 2026
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Conference: Politicizing Trauma: Mourning Before Art and the Body in the Work of Penny Goring
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City 7 March 2026 -
Alternative Self-Representation Workshop: "I stuck my face on many other things and places, including: the moon, so I owned the sky"
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City 7 - 28 March 2026
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Your Last Literature: Open Mic Night for Poetry and Handwritten Texts
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City 25 March 2026 -
Workshop: My Body Hurts Because My Body Desires: A Circle of Poetic Writing, Intimacy, and Rebellion
"Penny Goring: Unloving Love / El desamor del amor" (2026) - Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City 9 April - 21 May 2026
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