Along with Gabriel Orozco, Damian Ortega, Dr Lakra, and Minerva Cuevas, Cruzvillegas was considered part of a new movement in Latin American art (which has been compared to the YBA boom in Britain in the 1980s.
[4] Together with Lakra, Orozco and Gabriel Kuri he participated in "Friday Workshops" ("Taller de los Viernes") in the 1980s, a weekly meeting in which the artists met and collaborated.
[4] As Cruzvillegas explained in the exhibition catalogue for 'Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City (2007): "We learned together to discuss, criticise, and transform our work individually, with no programmes, marks, exams, diplomas or reprisals.
As described by Chris Sharp in Art Review, "autoconstrucción has been able to manifest in [...] many guises, places and modes: from small autonomous sculptures to large sculptural-cum-architectural installations; from mobile musical collaborations to an hourlong film, even a play.
[7] Christina Catherine Martinez stated in the Los Angeles Times in 2022, "Play is the substrate of autoconstrucción and its driving force, even as Cruzvillegas alternately breaks up and buttresses the idea with a catholic range of historical and artistic touchpoints, interests and memories.
[9] Autoconstrucción, writes art historian Robin Greeley, is "a sculptural practice of dynamic contingency derived from the ad hoc building procedures common in squatter settlements on the outskirts of megacities.
"[15] Writing for The Daily Telegraph, Mark Hudson noted the influence of "Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes and the grid-structured gardens of the Aztecs" and stated, "As a piece of gigantic sculpture, Empty Lot is one of the more dynamic and exciting of the Turbine Hall commissions.
"[16] Jonathan Jones, writing in The Guardian, called it "lazy and complacent, as if unbothered by the challenge, uninterested in winning an audience", an artwork with "no aesthetic power and precious little to think about", selecting it as his "worst" installation in the Turbine Hall series.
[22] In April 2018, Cruzvillegas created a site-specific installation at the Kitchen, New York made out of debris collected in the streets of Chelsea, housing a series of performances combining theatre, dance and aerial acrobatics.
[8] In 2023, he gave the Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, entitled: "Centring: A Definitely Unfinished and Temporary Structure for Art Making".
[27] For the 2002 São Paulo Biennial, Cruzvillegas wrote: "However art makes itself evident, it shall remain, above all, raw source material in all its natural, unstable, physical, chaotic and crystalline states: solid, liquid, colloidal and gaseous.
Morton states, "by bringing the work of these two men together Cruzvillegas not only expands the notion of 'influence' so that it might include the micro-stuff of specific domestic context alongside the macro-stuff of art history, but also casts into doubt the purity of the ready-made – which is to say, its inconsequentiality, its mute object-hood.
"[30] Chris Sharp, writing in Art Review in January 2013, wrote: "his works are often united by an identifiable formal sensibility, whose predominantly found-object or poor-material aesthetic influence is as indebted to Robert Rauschenberg, David Hammons and Jimmie Durham as it is to Gabriel Orozco.
[4] Similarly, Gareth Harris, writing in The Art Newspaper in January 2014, notes: "With his vast range of dynamic assemblage sculptures meticulously built from found objects, the Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas has been dubbed the 21st-century equivalent of Marcel Duchamp.