The exhibition brings together 38 works by eleven prominent Argentine artists, historical and contemporary. Among the heavyweights: Antonio Berni, Raquel Forner, Grete Stern, Liliana Maresca, Marcia Schvartz, and the Lamborghinis (Leónidas and Osvaldo). Contemporary voices like Verónica Meloni, Verónica Gómez, Tobías Dirty, and Santiago O. Rey are interwoven—each confronting the same themes: the wounded body, the remnants of history, the imprints of power.

What makes “Carroña Última Forma” compelling is its spatial logic and formal severity. The curators have constructed the show somewhat like a pilgrimage through suffering. Early in the exhibition the texts of Lamborghini’s book are displayed—fragmented, spaced, broken—so that even the act of reading becomes an allegory of decomposition.

Recoleta Cultural Center courtesy

Dominant works form an altar: Raquel Forner’s La Victoria (1939), Antonio Berni’s La Guerra (1976) and La Torturada (1976) are positioned centrally, confronting the viewer with horrors old and recent. Forner’s mutilated female form, its mythic distortions, juxtaposed with Berni’s raw political denunciations from the era of Argentina’s dictatorship, recall that atrocities refuse to slip quietly into history. Their presence here is unflinching.

The contemporary pieces complicate rather than soften the historical ones. Liliana Maresca’s photo-performance-based installation, with fragments of press images and the artist’s own nude body among ruins, transforms archival detritus into something both ghostly and immediate. Marcia Schvartz contributes ‘Berniadas’—assemblages of cardboard, waste, remnants—bringing the materiality of collapse into the viewer’s space. Tobías Dirty and Santiago Rey push further: their grotesque distortions, complex material surfaces, and visceral symbolism fuse the personal and the public in ways that are sometimes disorienting, but always provocative.

Recoleta Cultural Center courtesy

Yet the exhibition is not without tensions. The overwhelming darkness—both literal in the “cielo oscuro” of the mounting, and metaphorical in the weight of violence—can exhaust. At moments the show risks collapsing into spectacle: the horror becomes aestheticized. But perhaps that is part of its insistence: horror, when repeated enough, becomes normalized, and here one is forced to endure its repetition. That endurance is the point.

In sum, “Carroña Última Forma” feels like more than an exhibition; it is a reckoning. It asks: what do we do with the ruins of our past, the wounds we carry? It refuses easy consolations. Through its powerful assembly of voices—past and present—the show insists that the body, the political, the broken are not residues to forget, but forms of persistence. The Recoleta has offered no comfort here, but something more urgent: a chance to face what lingers.