The Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (Malba), one of the most visited museums in Argentina, inaugurated in April two exhibitions that closely follow the work of textile artists from Argentina, Paraguay, and Peru. One of them, entitled "Tejer las Piedras" (Weaving the Stones), features Peruvian Ana Teresa Barboza and gathers fourteen works produced during the last five years that condense several recurring elements in her work. Three pieces were made especially for the exhibition, among them "Quebradas que forman redes" (2022), conceived as a site-specific work for the museum's triple height.

"Hilo continuo" (2017) by Ana Teresa Barboza

This exhibition explores the connections between textiles and indigenous communities from a contemporary art perspective. In Barboza's works, the territories take on new life and show other ways of being and doing from a contemporary art perspective towards knowing how to work the materials available in a territory and the making of handcrafted objects, imprinting transformation as a possibility.

Barboza is characterized by using embroidery, tapestry, and basketry techniques and working with cotton threads, wool, stones, and reeds; both in large installations and in small tapestries and intervened photographs.

Textile work has many layers and when one sees a textile piece one does not see all the process behind it. In Peru, different traditional textile practices are still preserved. In these communities, they manage to understand the space where they live and use what they have around them to be able to produce textiles, basketry, or stone work.

"Urdir" (2018) by Ana Teresa Barboza

"Ovillos" (2017) by Ana Teresa Barboza

In this way, through ethnographic work, Barboza explores textiles as a testimony of tradition, nature, and indigenous origins. In her photographs, the image is woven from geological, climatic, and hydrological maps of the areas portrayed. The threads that make up the image are made from animal and vegetable fibers and dyed with natural dyes by communities close to the landscape portrayed in the intervened photos. The textiles do not resemble any other material because they form an interweaving between life and art.

In tapestry and embroidery, Ana Teresa Barboza explores ancient practices and indigenous materials, such as pre-colonial cotton and wool, to recover them, on the one hand, in their private and reflexive dimension and, on the other, as a collective practice, as a way of inhabiting the territory and its traditions.

"Tejer las Piedras", curated by Verónica Rossi, remains impregnated in the viewer's mind. It is a surprising exhibition, where textile art does not have the same artistic status as others.

between May 12, 2022 – June 5, 2022

Photo credits - the Art Museum in Cluj-Napoca

The apARTe gallery, of the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design, within the "G. Enescu" National University of Arts in Iași, presented between April 27 and May 3, an artistic experiment signed by the artist Monica Pop, whom she named PALINDROM, through which she “explores the intersection between media and forms of public communication associated with advertising design. Revisiting the collage, Monica Pop combines the elements of graphic design with photography in a visual format that evokes the size, materiality and saturated chromatics specific to the advertising poster", we learn from Assoc. Prof. Dr. Cristian Nae, curator of the project.

Photo credits - Aparte Gallery & Monica Pop

During the opening week of the 59th Biennale Arte of Venice, on the 20th of April the Californian artist Mary Weatherford inaugurated “The flaying of Marsyas” at the beautiful Grimani Palace, a Renaissance place in the heart of Venice where the doge Antonio Grimani and his family lived from the 16th century.

Photos from nytimes.com

The second floor, opened for the first time just for this exhibition, is totally for the big canvas with the neon of Weatherford. This series, created during the lockdown of 2021, has been inspired by the look of the work of  Titian “The flaying of Marsyas” in Rome some year ago.
The artist put on these canvases the colors and the light of this painting, playing with the palette also with the use of the neon. What Titian wanted to represent in his painting – the violence of the flaying, the grief of Marsyas who lost a musical competition against Apollo, the god of Music – can be seen also on the canvas of Weatherford, where her experiment with the light of the neon is able to analyze and reflect the violence and the atmosphere of the mythological theme.

Titian - “The flaying of Marsyas”

The exhibition, produced by Gagosian, has been organized with the help of the Regional Direction of Veneto and of the Venetian Heritage Foundation. It completes the will of Palazzo Grimani to combine the contemporaneity with the Palace, started also with the series Archinto by Georg Baselitz, always produced by Gagosian. 

Image: Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito

Furniture to look for lizards (2019) by Gabriela Fabre (artwork of the 4th edition of the Brazil Award)

Once upon a time... (2019) by Irene Domínguez (artwork of the 4th edition of the Brazil Award)

Selected Artists of the 5th edition of the Brazil Award

The Selection Committee consisted of two agents from the local contemporary art scene and a representative from the Center for Contemporary Art, who were appointed by the Embassy of Brazil in Ecuador and the CCA. This committee was responsible for choosing the shortlisted works that are part of the Temporary Exhibition Brazil Award 2022 – Emerging Art. In addition, they decide the winners of the Brazil Award, which has two categories: Residency and Acquisition.

A thousend times, Oh Patria (2019) by David Jarrín (artwork of the 4th edition of the Brazil Award)

The Acquisition Award, consists of the acquisition by the Brazilian Embassy of the winning artwork in the amount of $3000, with the purpose of making the winning work part of the artistic collection and the permanent exhibition of the Brazilian Embassy in Ecuador. The Residency Award, on the other hand, allows the winner to carry out an artistic stay in Pivô, São Paulo, thanks to the support of Produbanco. This award is valued at $3000 and is carried out under a program of extensive experience in the training of artists, based on the critical monitoring of projects and facilitating the development of the artworks. The value of the award includes round-trip airfare and lodging for the artist for one month.

Submersion (2019) by ADA Collective (artwork of the 4th edition of the Brazil Award)

The fourth edition was held in 2019 and received 95 applications, from which 16 finalist artists were selected. The Acquisition Prize was awarded to Karla Torres, with her work "Acuerdate de mí" (Remember me), where the artist embroiders hair of Mixe women (Ayuujk, located in Oaxaca-Mexico), on the napkins where they usually keep their tortillas. With this, the artist seeks not to forget the indigenous peoples and their practices, as well as to reflect on embroidery as a technique associated with femininity. Torres works on concepts such as cosmology, lineage, everyday life and affection.

Remember me (2019) by Karla Torres (Winning artwork of the Acquisition Prize of the 4th edition of the Brazil Award)

The Residency Award went to David Cevallos, with the work "Piedra Luna" (moon rock), where he speaks of detachment from matter, as he creates his work from the destruction of old artworks by the artist himself, through a ritual. Thus, he works concepts such as restarting and change.

Moon Rock (2019) by David Cevallos (Winning artwork of the Residency Prize of the 4th edition of the Brazil Award)

The awards ceremony of the fifth edition will take place on May 27 at 19:00 pm at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito, from that moment on, the winners of both the acquisition award and the residency award will be announced, as well as the rest of the artworks selected by the curatorial committee.

Under the slogan "The habit of creating new worlds", an axis for thinking about other universes, especially post-pandemic ones, the Biennial of Young Art was held at the Recoleta Cultural Center, the mythical exhibition space in Argentina. One of the most outstanding visual art exhibitions is "Terra Incógnita", curated by Laura Spivak, which explores an unexplored and imagined territory by Argentine artists Renata Schussheim, Dana Ferrari, Emilia De las Carreras, Ramiro Quesada Pons and Nazareno Pereyra.

The project consists of installations, sculptures, and showcases with all kinds of strange and undefined objects created by the young artists, congregated around the mermaid, the work of the consecrated artist Schussheim.

Installation by Renata Schussheim (2022)