When asked to share his thoughts on beauty for an episode of PBS's Art 21, Mexican-born artist Gabriel Orozco replied, "It's not that the thing is beautiful. It's the relationship you establish that makes the thing beautiful."

Orozco's formidable body of work ranges from sculpture and photography to installation and video, and is characterized by a winsomely madcap and thought-provoking lyricism. His distinctive aesthetic and that of kurimanzutto, the nomadic gallery he founded in 1999, have influenced Mexico's most noteworthy artists, a group that rarely settles on any one artistic medium.

Working between Mexico City and Amsterdam, Carlos Amorales uses lucha libre-style performances, installation, and painting to explore notions of good and evil. His 2007 installation Black Cloud covered Yvon Lambert New York's gallery walls and rafters in a near-biblical swarm of 25,000 paper moths. Veteran artist Daniel Guzmán takes a lo-fi approach to drawing, mixed media, painting, and video. Often compared to Raymond Pettibon, Guzmán recalls classic '70s comics with a restless cast of skulls, ghosts, and losers. Created in New York and Berlin, work by Columbia-educated upstart and e-flux cofounder Julieta Aranda examines the constructed nature of identity in sound installations, graffiti-style paintings, and photographs.

A true prankster, Gustavo Artigas creates intentionally discomfiting works that re-examine the social contract. His disastrous happenings violently upset normal protocol — a motorcycle crashes through a museum lobby, a man sets himself on fire, and look-alikes masquerade as the artist at an opening. Miguel Calderón — the painter of those masked four-wheelers in The Royal Tenenbaums — takes a similarly raucous approach to art-making, though tempered with a dose of low-brow silliness. Whether broadcasting a fake soccer match to unwitting crowds in Brazil, or producing a film about a psychic race-car driver, Calderón's art flares with the wit of a consummate trickster.

Installation artist Teresa Margolles confronts mortality, class, and bodily transformations. Her 1999 work Entierro/Burial memorializes a woman's miscarriage in a sealed concrete burial chamber, while 2002's Fin drove viewers out of the gallery space when the artist flooded it with a mixture of cement and water used to wash corpses. Taking a less morbid, but equally aggressive approach, art activist Minerva Cuevas founded Mejor Vida Corp (Better Life Company), which redresses social and financial injustices by making freely available discounted barcode stickers, subway passes, and prepaid envelopes that hack the system.

Using surveillance and complex algorithms, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer creates interactive, computer-driven artworks that ask us to re-examine our relationships with one another, technology, and public spaces. In his 2006 Homographies, fluorescent ceiling lights are motion-activated, allowing them to track viewers through the space. For 2003's site-specific Amodal Suspension, text messages were translated into flashes over a city skyline, then projected onto a museum facade, revealing the private to the public.

As Lozano-Hemmer's work elegantly demonstrates, the promise of these works is in their effort to authentically engage the audience — to, echoing Orozco, establish a relationship. And it's this openness that makes Mexican art as vibrant and insistent as ever.

-Jocelyn K. Glei