Seven Staffers, Two and a Half Weeks: The Museum's Biggest Install Yet
The de la Torre brothers' "The Tipping Point" fills Laguna Art Museum with a 304-inch banquet table, golden pigs and political maximalism through Jan. 24, 2027.
The most labor-intensive installation in Laguna Art Museum's history is now on view. "The Tipping Point," the exhibition of work by brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre, opened Aug. 1 and runs through Jan. 24, 2027, according to the museum's exhibition calendar.
Installing it took seven staff members two and a half weeks, with the direction and assistance of the artists, a museum staff member told Roborant Review. The centerpiece is "The Dining Table" (2026), a 304-inch banquet-length table staging a lavish dinner scene: each place setting holds a pink plastic Kewpie doll bathed in a syrupy red liquid, wine glasses and bottles spill gold coins and splatter liquids, and glass and ceramic statuary line the table's center. The star among them is "Capitalist Pig," a pink pig on wheels wearing a crown and a top hat, a dollar sign on its side and golden coins embellishing it. Three chandeliers hang above, one decorated with beads and money bags, while cherub sculptures and taxidermy animals wearing gold chains with dollar signs line the walls.
The brothers, Einar, born in 1963, and Jamex, born in 1960, moved to the United States as teenagers and have been collaborating since the 1990s. Living on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, they load blown glass, ceramic work and lenticular images with influences from pre-Columbian forms, Catholic iconography, colonial history, border culture, popular media and consumer life. They quote Picasso on appropriation: "Good artists copy, great artists steal."
The show's thesis is that built-up pressure, cultural, political, environmental and spiritual, can become so powerful that it ultimately alters the world. The installation is designed to surround the viewer: ornate wallpaper, lighting and floor-level objects turn the gallery into an immersive tableau about society's fascination with wealth, abundance, consumption and participation in systems of excess.
The critique sharpens in "Ship of Fools" (2025), an installation whose dysfunctional passengers include an arrogant orange glass pig, a Ku Klux Klan member, a money bag with arms and legs, small dolls dressed as 18th-century British aristocracy and ceramic shoes, with golden coins spread throughout. The endless gold across the show, including golden eggs affixed to the walls, evokes the Oval Office's current gilded decor, the review notes.
When questioned about the proliferation of gold, the brothers respond, "Successful art addresses the human condition." Their philosophy traces to childhood in Guadalajara, where they made modeling-clay toys their family could not afford, and to family travels through Michoacán and Oaxaca, where the variety of vernacular crafts fed the dense cultural symbolism of their work today. Their process, they say, is "a continuous dialogue that goes back and forth," adding, "We have so much in common in subject matter, aesthetics, and in the use of material. Over the years, our work got more layered and complex."
It is colorful and bizarre and political and spiritual at once, and it rewards close looking. "The Tipping Point" runs through Jan. 24, 2027, at Laguna Art Museum.
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