At the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, “La noche y las palabras” (The Night and the Words) offers an immersive, rigorous look into the multidisciplinary practice of Leandro Katz. Spanning decades of conceptual photography, film, and archival research, the exhibition operates less like a standard retrospective and more like an ongoing investigation into how history is constructed, recorded, and ultimately romanticized.
Central to the exhibition is Katz’s long-standing obsession with the intersection of language, archaeology, and the visual document. His famous project re-evaluating the 19th-century expeditions of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood takes center stage. Rather than merely re-photographing Maya ruins, Katz lays bare the colonial gaze embedded within early visual archaeology. By aligning contemporary photographic plates with Catherwood’s lithographs, he fractures the myth of the objective visual record, forcing the viewer to confront the gaps between what was drawn, what was captured, and what was lost.

What makes “La noche y las palabras” so compelling in the flesh is its pacing. Katz treats text not as an explanatory accompaniment to images, but as a material force. Words appear as projections, typographies engraved into landscapes, or lyrical fragments that destabilize the images they sit beside. In his celebrated lunar photography series, the passage of time is rendered almost tangible; the moon becomes an alphabet, a shifting symbol recorded through precise, poetic discipline.

Stepping into “Curada de espanto” (Cured of Fright) at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires (MACBA) feels less like entering a museum gallery and more like eavesdropping on a secret ceremony long after the participants have fled. In her debut solo museum exhibition, Porteña painter Ornella Pocetti offers a seductive, unsettling dive into a world ruled by suspicion, uncanny femininity, and psychological tension.

Ornella Pocetti at MACBA

The exhibition’s title—a colloquial Argentine phrase translating roughly to "cured of fright" or hardened against fear—carries an immediate irony. Pocetti’s canvases do not celebrate immunity to horror; rather, they dissect the scars left behind by trauma and desire. Her figures, mostly women rendered with lush, velvety brushwork, exist in a realm of perpetual limbo. Turned away from the viewer or half-submerged in eerie, twilight landscapes, they seem caught between waiting for an impending catastrophe and reckoning with one that has already transpired.

Pocetti’s technical dexterity shines in how she handles surface and light. High heels, bare skin, serpentine shapes, and heavy iron framing elements coexist within compositions that borrow as much from 19th-century Symbolism and Latin American magical realism as they do from contemporary cinematic framing. Her palettes—deep, bruised purples, sickly greens, and flashes of hyper-saturated hues—create an oppressive intimacy that draws you in while warning you to stay back. The lingering presence of the snake, appearing across several works as both an omen of betrayal and a symbol of shed skin, acts as a master key to the show's underlying motif: transformation through exposure to the strange.

Belkis Ayón’s “Myth and Disobedience” brings together a body of work in which myth, gender, secrecy, and ritual become intertwined within an intensely personal visual language. The exhibition, currently on view at MALBA, brings together seven works from the Malba–Costantini Collection, produced between 1991 and 1998, in what is the first exhibition devoted to Ayón by an Argentine institution. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive retrospective, the selection concentrates on a crucial period in the Cuban artist’s short but remarkably influential career.

“Vechy Logioio. Travesía”, currently on view at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, offers a thoughtful survey of an artist whose work has remained remarkably consistent while continually expanding its formal vocabulary. Rather than presenting a chronological retrospective, the exhibition foregrounds the persistence of Logioio’s visual concerns across different media, bringing together bronze sculptures, paintings, collages, and mixed-media works that reveal a sustained investigation into form, surface, and spatial relationships.

The exhibition is structured around a dialogue between two-dimensional and three-dimensional works. Instead of treating painting and sculpture as separate practices, Logioio approaches them as complementary ways of thinking through volume and space. Her paintings and collages, many of them produced during the 1990s, rely on subtle geometric structures, restrained chromatic harmonies, and textured surfaces that invite prolonged looking. These works avoid spectacle, preferring quiet visual rhythms in which composition becomes an exercise in balance rather than assertion.

The sculptures extend this investigation into physical space. Cast in bronze, they combine solidity with fluidity, resisting stable or literal interpretation. Their organic silhouettes oscillate between abstraction and bodily suggestion, while their curved planes and abrupt interruptions produce shifting relationships with light and shadow. Rather than occupying space as monumental objects, they activate it, encouraging viewers to move around them and experience form as something constantly redefined through perception.

Some artists produce images, and there are artists who produce themselves as images. Centro Cultural Recoleta’s exhibition “Federico Klemm. Iluminador de mitos” (Federico Klemm. Illuminator of Myths) belongs entirely to the second category. Far from functioning as a conventional retrospective, the show reconstructs the delirious symbolic universe of an artist who transformed excess into method and spectacle into philosophy. More than twenty years after his death, Federico Klemm emerges not as a relic of 1990s Argentine culture, but as a figure strangely contemporary: obsessed with surfaces, self-mythology, performance, media, and desire.

From the opening moments of the exhibition, “Visión imposible” (Impossible Vision) at Recoleta Cultural Center reveals itself as less a conventional “show” and more a deliberate reimagining of materials and space: a sculptural installation that dissolves the boundary between drawing and three-dimensional form. Ullua uses mild steel — a humble, industrial metal — as if it were pencil or charcoal, lifting lines off a page and suspending them in air. The result is simultaneously minimal and daring: delicate arcs, loops, and tangles that hover, bend and hover again, tracing volatile geometries in the gallery’s volume.

Recoleta Cultural Center

What makes this transformation especially powerful is Ullua’s willingness to embrace color. In “Visión imposible”, the metal is not only shaped; it is painted, coated, gifted with hues that introduce new perceptual tensions. The interplay of line, volume, and color destabilizes the viewer’s assumptions: a “drawing” that occupies space, a “sculpture” that feels graphic. The gallery becomes a field of floating gestures, where shadows and reflections participate, and where negative space becomes as charged as the material itself.

Beneath the formal experimentation lies, however, a quiet wit and a sense of modesty, traits characteristic of Ullua’s broader practice. The exhibition does not seek grandeur, but intimacy. The metal lines do not attempt to dominate; they insinuate, invite, challenge quietly. It is a humble poetry of form, born from discarded or industrial materials repurposed into delicate structures.

Moreover, “Visión imposible” seems to ask something of the viewer: to move, to shift perspective, to reconsider what counts as drawing, what counts as volume, what counts as space. At different vantage points, the work changes, lines that appear connected dissolve, tangles resolve into airy arcs. In this way, the exhibition becomes less a static display than a dynamic experience, a choreography of gaze and spatial relation.

Curated by Carla Barbero, the show feels like a thoughtful continuation and refinement of Ullua’s ongoing investigation into the poetic potential of industrial material, line, humor, and space. It neither flaunts technical virtuosity nor shock value; instead, it invites reflection, subtle disorientation, and a renewed awareness of how a simple “line” can occupy and transform the world around us.

For those accustomed to heavy, monumental contemporary sculpture, “Visión imposible” might feel almost ghostly: thin, airy, fragile. Yet that is precisely its strength. There is an elegance in its restraint, a radicalism in sparseness. It’s an exhibition that doesn’t shout, it whispers. And in its whispers, it manages to rewire the space of the gallery, and briefly, rewire how we see.

Fernando Maza: “La construcción de la pintura” (The Construction of Painting) is a quietly mesmerizing testament to the singular vision of one of Argentina’s most enigmatic painters. At the National Museum of Fine Arts, over fifty oils and watercolors chart a rich trajectory—from Maza’s early informalist experiments in the late 1950s to his most contemplative works produced in his French retirement.

Curated by Pablo De Monte, the exhibition succeeds in presenting Maza not simply as a painter, but as a metaphysical architect of space. Rather than depicting the natural world, his canvases conjure invented landscapes whose structures — staircases that lead to nowhere, arches that open into silence — suggest neither destination nor origin.

Walking through the galleries of MACBA in San Telmo, one encounters the delicate yet insistently resonant world of Argentine artist Candelaria Traverso in her first solo-museum presentation in Argentina. The exhibition gathers works created over the last eight years — textiles, drawings, artist-notebooks, soft sculptures — all of which serve as elegies to the time of things, the traces objects carry, and the quiet persistence of memory.

MACBA

MACBA

MACBA

“Esto es Teatro. Once Escenas Experimentales: Del Di Tella al Parakultural” (This is Theater. Eleven Experimental Scenes: from Di Tella to Parakultural) currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, is an extraordinary exploration of Argentina’s experimental theater, tracing its trajectory from the avant-garde impulses of the 1960s to the countercultural fervor of the 1980s and 90s. Far from a conventional historical survey, the exhibition positions theater as both a laboratory of artistic innovation and a site of sociopolitical reflection.