Armory Art fair 2025: Leopoldo Goût

  Leopoldo Goût is an artist, writer, and filmmaker who works across mediums to capture the ephemeral: an abstract and figurative clash with memory and humanity, with chaos. Born in Mexico City, Goût grew up among poets, musicians, explorers, activists, filmmakers, scientists, and visual artists. Their stories and ideas inspired Goût, who quickly became part of that community. He embarked on numerous artistic pursuits: painting, drawing, sculpture, filmmaking, digital art, soundscapes, performance, and more. He studied in London at the renowned Central Saint Martins School of Art through a full scholarship from the Mexican Center for the Arts and the British Council. He also won the Erasmus scholarship, despite not being European. It was at school that he began to approach his work as a kaleidoscope of references, and begin to explore all of the media he is known for today. All his projects influence each other in unexpected ways. Goût’s perspective is a confluence of the modern and ancient; order and disorder, and he views different media as languages. He has written and produced films, documentaries, and television shows for more than a decade (Molly’s Game, directed by Aaron Sorkin; Days of Grace directed by Everardo Goût, Get Millie Black, in collaboration with Marlon James). Goût’s documentary film Carlos debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival and was theatrically distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. He wrote and produced The Chosen One (El Elegido) with his brother Everardo, a television show that debuted on Netflix in 2023 on the top 10 list in more than 70 countries. Goût is also an accomplished novelist. His book Piñata with Nightfire (Macmillan) won the Top 10 Horror Novels of 2023. His series Genius: The Game won several awards, including The Mathical Book Prize, the CONACULTA grant for artists, and various other recognitions in film, documentaries, and art.

  He is in the process of transforming his illustrated novel Monarca (Harper One) into a magical experiential adventure in support of the butterfly sanctuaries in Michoacán, México. He lives with his family in NYC and has studios in NYC, Mexico City, and Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca. His work has appeared in galleries and museums throughout the world, including The West Collection of Pennsylvania, The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, Galeria Museo of Bogotá, Colombia, The Dikeou Collection, Tricia Collins Contemporary Art, Sandra Gering, Jack Tilton, and MoMA PS1.

  He made a long awaited return to public exhibition with Povos Gallery in 2024.

povos Armory Show 2025— Leopoldo Goût: Meteoritos & Meteorito

  In Meteoritos & Meteorito, Leopoldo Goút transforms tapestry into a site of collision— between memory and geology, ritual and randomness, ancestry and the cosmos. Woven in Teotitlán del Valle with the Ruiz Mendoza family, each work is the outcome of an elemental process: plants and minerals gathered from the Oaxacan landscape are transfigured into dyes; knots become sculptural events; color becomes matter. What emerges are not simply textiles but vast fields of woven energy—tapestries as monumental as Mexican murals, where abstraction and image reverberate against one another like the echo of an impact.

  The genesis of the project is both cosmic and biographical. As a child, Goút learned that the Yucatán Peninsula was formed by the meteor strike that ended the age of dinosaurs. That knowledge, lodged in the imagination, became not a symbol of extinction but of transformation—of destruction as prelude to creation. The tapestries embody that paradox: they are woven records of rupture, documents of an earth that was forever changed, and of a humanity born in the wake of randomness. Goút threads into their surfaces the spark of life itself, conjuring the moment when a celestial visitor reshaped the planet’s destiny.

At the same time, the work is an act of return. The studio in Oaxaca stands near where Goút’s father was born; the collaboration with the Ruiz Mendoza family is a re-weaving of lineage, a reconnection to roots. In the film Common Thread, we see this process unfold as a meditation on resilience and continuity: the loom as both instrument and altar, the act of weaving as ritual repetition. For Goút, whose own dyslexia has taught him the discipline of returning, of working through gesture and muscle memory, the loom becomes a mirror of his body’s need for rhythm. Each knot is a pulse, a breath, a way of staying inside the act of making until the work itself becomes a form of meditation.

  Goút’s broader practice—drawing, painting, sculpture, sound, film—converges here in the tapestries, which act as gravitational centers for the entire cycle. They are porous surfaces, absorbing influences from Mexican muralism to indigenous cosmology to sacred geometry. But above all, they are charged by what the artist calls “the full galactic power of our incredible randomness of being.” Like meteors streaking across the sky—captured in chance videos, blazing suddenly before war—Meteoritos & Meteorito renders the fleeting sublime into permanence.

  These tapestries are not background, nor ornament; they are environments of thought. They invite us to step inside a dialogue between myth and science, memory and accident, Mexico and the infinite. Goút knots us into that conversation, threading us into the vast fabric of randomness that binds the cosmos and, within it, the fragile persistence of being human.

- Leopoldo Goût

"Also making its Armory debut, the dynamic Chicago-based Povos Gallery presented a solo booth of Mexican multidisciplinary artist Leopoldo Gout, following his sold-out show at the gallery last year. Gout’s ever-expanding creativity traverses mediums and themes, weaving stories about human nature in relation to the natural world and emphasizing the power of collective imagination. The gallery reported strong interest and promising conversations likely to lead to additional sales in the coming days."

 - Observer