IK LAB, the new contemporary art gallery opened in Tulum, Mexico, is a fitting addition to the wellness-and-spirituality-loving beachside town. Set within the grounds of the eco-friendly Azulik resort, the space boasts a truly unique character: its walls are curved, its floors undulate, and its massive glass windows and doors are circular, like new moons. Every surface is covered with saplings and vines, sourced sustainably from local jungles, or swaths of smooth faux-concrete whose texture recalls the interior of a shell; living trees and plant life sprout from walls, the ceiling, and the floor. The experience demands mindfulness—you must be barefoot inside, and if you’re not careful, you could lose balance, or worse, trip over a work of art. This unconventional approach to a gallery space is all by design, however.
The gallery is the brainchild of Azulik founder Jorge Eduardo Neira Sterkel, who is also a self-taught architect, and gallerist-slash-art advisor Santiago Rumney Guggenheim (great-grandson to Peggy).
“We want to trigger the creative minds of artists to create for a completely different environment,” Rumney told me as we sat within the ovoid-shaped office space within the gallery. “We are challenging the artists to make work for a space that doesn’t have straight walls or floors—we don’t even have walls really, it’s more like shapes coming out of the floor. And the floor is hardly a floor.”
IK LAB’s program (which also extends to a domed structure on the grounds of Azulik, a few minutes walk from the main gallery), will foreground inspiration and creativity, inviting artists to respond to the eco-friendly venue and tap into Tulum more broadly, while accepting the daunting challenge of creating work that sings in such an idiosyncratic space.
Neira Sterkel designed the art space over the past few years, after opening Azulik 13 years ago. His unconventional approach to architecture involves no drawings or blueprints, but rather imagining his spaces on the fly; he goes to the land where the structure will be, traces the shape with wire, develops a vision for it, and then shares that with architects and the skilled indigenous Mayan builders he hires to realize it.
The architecture of the gallery is challenging, but that’s exactly what motivated the young Rumney Guggenheim to pursue the venture. He recalls the first experience of walking into the gallery (at that point there were no immediate plans for the art space) as “mind-blowing.” The curved walls, he said, reminded him of his great-grandmother’s legendary Art of This Century gallery, the 57th Street space where she gave many exhibits.
https://www.iklab.art/