John Giorno's Poetry Lands in Mexico City: 'Life Is a Killer' Opens at Kurimanzutto
John Giorno — the American poet, artist and activist who turned verse into something you could dial on a phone, dance to on a record, or stare at on a wall — gets his first solo exhibition in Mexico City this week.
"John Giorno: LIFE IS A KILLER" opens at the Kurimanzutto gallery on August 29 and runs through October 10, 2026, the gallery confirmed on its exhibition page Kurimanzutto. The show centres on Giorno's black-and-white Poetry Paintings, text-based canvases he produced from the 2000s onward that press his poems into bold, graphic visual form.
Kurimanzutto, which began representing Giorno's estate in 2024, has assembled more than paintings. Rirkrit Tiravanija, the Thai artist known for participatory works, has contributed an installation with four record players, each loaded with vinyl from Giorno Poetry Systems — the nonprofit label Giorno founded in 1965, now 61 years old and overseen by the John Giorno Foundation. The records feature poetry readings by Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith and others Artnet News.
Tiravanija also filmed Giorno reading five decades of his own writing. That footage — ten hours of it — screens in the gallery under the title Untitled (John Giorno Reads) (2008).
On Saturdays during the run, the gallery hosts readings of Giorno's poetry translated into Spanish for the first time. The translations were produced during weekly meetings at La Americana, a cafe and bookstore in the Condesa neighbourhood of Mexico City.
Giorno, who died in 2019, was a central figure in the downtown New York art and poetry scene for over half a century. His Dial-A-Poem project, launched in 1968, let anyone call a phone number and hear a recorded poem — an experiment that sat at the intersection of counterculture, telecommunications and what would later be called conceptual art.
The Mexico City show arrives amid a wave of institutional recognition. Giorno's first major museum exhibition, "The Performative Word," was mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. Before that, his first solo gallery show — "Black Paintings and Drawings" — took place at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York in 2012, more than four decades into his career Kurimanzutto. Most recently, "John Giorno: Welcoming the Flowers" ran at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from June 12 to September 7, 2025.
Since "I ♥ John Giorno," a sprawling 2017 retrospective spread across 13 venues, the artist had not had a major museum presentation in Mexico or New York Artnet News. Kurimanzutto previously presented the Giorno exhibition "Jasmine Burn" at its New York space in early 2024, a show rooted in Giorno's decades-long engagement with Tibetan Buddhism.
What makes the Mexico City show distinctive is how it collapses the distance between Giorno's different modes. The paintings hang on the walls. The records spin. The film runs for ten hours. And on Saturday afternoons, his words are spoken aloud in a language he never read them in — translated by a community that gathered in a bookshop to do the work.
