MEXICO CITY, June 21 (Reuters) - Mexico's gruesome drug war and its hundreds of executions a year are the inspiration for an art exhibit of red-splattered blankets meant to represent shrouds used by hitmen to dispose of their victims.

Rosa Maria Robles has laid tattered blankets, some of them with bits of plastic tape stuck to them, on floors in a museum in Sinaloa, a rural northern state that has long been a hotbed of drug smuggling and gangland murder.

Organized criminals in Mexico often cover the corpses of their victims, hands taped together and shot in the head, with a blanket before dumping them on quiet roads or abandoning them in the trunk of a car.

Robles exhibit, called the "Red Carpet" and open since May, had included blankets from actual crimes, complete with real blood, museum curator Rosa Maria Hass told Reuters.

"We decided to hand them over to the attorney general's office for investigation," Hass said, adding the artist has refused to say where she got them.

Evening news programs in Mexico regularly show images of forensic investigators photographing bodies draped in bloodied covers and the verb "to blanket" has taken on new meaning.

Another part of Robles' exhibition draws attention to beheadings, increasingly used by drug gangs to terrorize rival groups and even the army.

The government has sent the army to hotspots across Mexico to dismantle smuggling cartels battling for lucrative territory along the U.S. border, but there are few signs of improvement.

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