The visual language is defiantly surreal. Eleven freshly minted canvases dominate the space—one is colossal, depicting a funeral car in ominous grandeur. Characters appear suspended between roles (heroes, spectres, objects) never fully legible. In “Conversación”, figures face each other without meeting the viewer’s gaze, rupturing narrative continuity and generating an antiseptic, strangely cold interaction. The disjunctions, like hat beside dragon, sofa next to seminudista, emphasize a deliberate unease. Bencardino uses distortion as aesthetic choice, as she “recoils from literal flatness,” probing “the spectral life of objects” and questioning binaries like good and evil.

This anticlassical approach extends to the installation itself, recalling an immersive club or cinema, with purple carpets and walls that envelop visitors in a nocturnal mood. The staging, simultaneously convivial and uncanny, mirrors the paintings’ oscillation between familiarity and the fantastical.

Interwoven in the exhibition is a video monologue, “Los sueños están rotos”, through which Bencardino probes influences ranging from surrealism to magical thinking, articulating an urgent desire to forge images that shatter complacent, totalizing narratives. She challenges the passivity induced by AI-generated imagery (“infinite images, infinite answers… what if it only anesthetizes us?”), reclaiming imagination as a terrain of rebellion and shared dreaming.

Technically, her brushwork favors gestural fluidity over precision, reflecting her non-binary identity and rejecting rigid forms. The material presence of paint, its viscous gestures, layered textures; works in concert with her themes: uncertainty, liminality, multiplicity.

Bencardino’s art positions itself at the threshold of perception. It asks not what we see, but what we feel when we see, and how this sensation reconfigures how we live—and collectively dream. In an era haunted by literal and metaphorical diseases—polarization, alienation—the exhibition stakes a claim for the imagination as a radical frontier.

At “El desentierro del diablo”, the devil is less a figure than an impulse, the drive to unearth, disturb, and re‑enchant. That impulse, beautifully disruptive, arrives at MALBA with a roar. This is a debut that doesn’t merely occupy institutional space; it excavates it, channeling the subterranean energies of the psyche onto the gallery’s floors and walls.

Guillermo Kuitca, "Tres Noches" (1986)

The curatorship, in charge of Sonia Becce and Nancy Rojas, emphasizes 1986 as a turning point in Kuitca's career. According to Becce, this period represents “a sort of beginning of Kuitca's Big Bang,” where the young artist began to develop his own highly experimental language.

The exhibition also highlights Kuitca's relationship with theater, evidenced in series such as “Nadie olvida nada” and “El mar dulce,” which share titles with plays he directed in the 1980s. This connection underscores the influence of the performing arts on his pictorial approach, fusing the domestic with the dramatic and creating atmospheres that invite introspection.

“Kuitca 86” is not a conventional retrospective; it is a focused exploration that allows the viewer to enter a key moment in Kuitca's artistic evolution, understanding the roots of his visual language and his impact on contemporary Latin American art.

“Manifestación” has a metaphysical significance for Malba, an institution dedicated to Latin American art. In the 1930s, Berni opened a new horizon for Argentine art with the New Realism. This theoretical support sustains and links “Manifestación” to a large part of the works exhibited in this museum. In Paris, Berni had found a personal style within surrealism. He was only 25 when he returned to Argentina and discovered the crisis, unemployment, and misery. He then rethought his position as an artist. The dramatic experience induced him to found the New Realism, a movement connected to social events.

Ninety years after the first public appearance of Antonio Berni's “Manifestación”, the Mondongo duo presented a remake in plasticine, together with a tondo and a site-specific installation. It is a tondo de la Villa II, a circular piece, also in plasticine, two meters in diameter that deals with scenes from the suburbs of Buenos Aires, Dharavi (Bombay, India), and Rio de Janeiro. To reach the works, first, you can cross or go around a site-specific installation, which recreates the aesthetics of precarious housing, made of sheet metal and wood, more in the style of emergency settlements like those that today are built in the land seizures than in a villa, but in this case, they refer to the houses that were built in the first half of the twentieth century.

This decision of aesthetic proposal does not go unnoticed and is proposed as an invitation to debate. The fact that it takes place in a private museum and not in a public one, in one of the most expensive areas of Buenos Aires, will be an argument for both sides because while some will see it as a dispiriting gesture at a time of enormous social injustice, for others it will be precisely these characteristics that make it the ideal space to highlight an inescapable reality.

This exhibition goes beyond the commemorative, as it once again brings into discussion the role that art can play. The theme of Manifestación continues to be valid, and that is beyond discussion. One only needs to go out in the street, be attentive to the news, or even scroll through that construct of subjectivities that are the social networks, to understand that the piece was extended in national history until the present. And this remake of Mondongo, at this moment in history, proves it. Due to the cyclical nature of Argentina, the reversion of the duo formed by Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha, made in high relief format, is presented in a social context with points in common with the original: with half of the country under the poverty line, protests and violence in front of Congress, to name a few.

"Dreaming of Water" is the retrospective of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennial, held at Malba and organized in collaboration with the National Museum of Fine Arts of Santiago de Chile and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. On display are some two hundred works, including installations, paintings, texts, silkscreen prints, collages, textiles, videos, photographs, book objects, and drawings that traverse her career.

"No habrá ninguno igual" (There will be None Like Him) is the solo exhibition of Argentine artist Edgardo Giménez at MALBA. He is one of the pioneers of pop art in the country, who revolutionized with his works full of color and humor that criticized the social scenario of the 60s and 70s. The exhibition brings together more than 70 works that invite visitors to learn about his history through six installations.