Energía, by Mathias Goeritz, Chapultepec

Energía is one of Mathias Goeritz‘s most astounding public sculptures. Positioned perfectly between the Torres de Satélite he’d completed in 1957, and his Museo Experimental el Eco (1953), somehow this 1982 work seems to answer many of the mysterious questions that hang in the air about the artist’s work even today.

“Energy,” as the title would translate, is no doubt in some conversation. Diego Rivera’s long and very different meditation on “water” is just across the way at the Cárcamo. Here 25 years later, Goeritz faces his own twilight years. There’s a maturity he must have earlier recognized in those late works from Rivera even as his own career was getting well underway. The even-closer monument, visible from the fence is el Hemiciclo al Defensor de la Patria. That monument was dedicated in 2017.

The tower of Energía is 18 meters high. At the peak, six volumes intersect, joined at unequal directions and angles. The work was rehabbed in 2017, in commemoration of the centenary of the artist’s birth two years prior. It had been long neglected. The rehab included not just work on the presentation of the sculpture, but on the surrounding landscape, too.

Mathias Goeritz had longed worked on towers, perhaps the pinnacle being those he’d completed in 1957. Here, too, the tower looks out over the traffic at the edge of the park.  The sculpture is best approached from the Chivatito entrance to Chapultepec, just southwest of the indicator in the map.