“If painting is something, painting is like a gesture on top of a gesture.”
To Mexican artist Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, painting is both a conceptual and philosophical act: One that questions the Western canon, critiques capitalism, and imagines alternative systems of thought.
Although she works primarily with painting, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger situates herself as a conceptual artist: “I usually say that I use painting, but I’m actually a conceptual artist. So I use the medium of painting to achieve those conceptual goals.” Her practice challenges established genealogies of art, as she explains: ”When you’re painting a painting, you’re painting on top of the history of painting. The canvas is never empty.”
One way Frieda Toranzo Jaeger challenges the medium of painting is by embedding embroidery into her canvases. For her, this is a way to disrupt the primacy of oil painting and open up new cultural frameworks “quite literally penetrating the Western canon with something else,” she elaborates.
For Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, painting is essentially a philosophical and ontological practice. For her, art is not about fixing or defining but about reflecting: “If art is anything, if we could define art as anything, it would be the deepest act of self-reflection.”
A central motif in her work is cars: “It’s the symbol of the industrial revolution. It’s a great symbol for capitalism. It’s a great symbol for masculinity.” The car interior becomes, in her words, a “psychological space of capitalism” where questions of privilege, agency, and power emerge. More recently, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger has turned her attention to artificial intelligence, describing it as part of an “algorithmic capitalism” in which human agency is slowly disempowered.
Deeply rooted in her Mexican context, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger emphasizes the importance of Marxism and muralism as radical traditions: “Muralism was at one point like, okay, let’s take art out of the bourgeoisie. And they did it. Where are th ese murals? They are in public institutions, they are in union buildings. And this is a movement that was concerned with their effectivity.” For her, revisiting these legacies is not nostalgic but urgent: “When we feel lost in the art world, a revision of Marxism is totally needed, and a desire for more socialist tissue for workers and art workers needs to happen.”
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger acknowledges art’s limits and necessity: “Sometimes we make the mistake to think that art should communicate. I think art, in general, is studying the limitations of our communication.” Painting, she suggests, can serve as a gathering place for the overwhelming, incommunicable aspects of life.
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (b. 1988, Mexico City) is a Mexican painter whose work engages with questions of capitalism, coloniality, technology, and identity through a hybrid practice that merges painting, embroidery, and installation. She has exhibited internationally, including Modern Art Oxford (2024); MoMA PS1, New York (2022); HFBK Hamburg (2022); Baltimore Museum of Art (2021). In 2024, Toranzo Jaeger was included in the 60th International Art Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia, She lives and works in Mexico City.
Nanna Rebekka interviewed Frieda Toranzo Jaeger in her studio in Mexico City in June 2025. Additional filming took place at Den Frie in Copenhagen in connection with her exhibition,’Surface Intelligence’.
Editor and producer: Nanna Rebekka
Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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