The retrospective Mi corazón es un imán 1992–2025 (My heart is a magnet) by Fernanda Laguna at MALBA unfolds as both an archive and an affective landscape, resisting the conventional logic of institutional display. Rather than imposing a linear narrative, the exhibition (curated by Miguel A. López) embraces dispersion, intimacy, and accumulation, bringing together around 200 works produced over three decades. Paintings, drawings, collages, textiles, installations, writings, and personal documents coexist without hierarchy, foregrounding Laguna’s refusal to separate art from life.

MALBA

Laguna’s practice has long been described as “indisciplinary,” moving fluidly between visual art, literature, activism, and self-managed cultural initiatives. This exhibition makes that hybridity tangible: handwritten notes appear alongside fragile objects; decorative motifs coexist with urgent political gestures. The result is less a retrospective in the traditional sense than a porous constellation of gestures, where the personal becomes a mode of collective address.

What emerges most forcefully is Laguna’s sustained commitment to the everyday. Her aesthetic, often associated with precarious materials, informal mark-making, and a deliberately “naïve” visual language, operates as a critical position within the history of Argentine contemporary art. Hearts, phrases, and modest surfaces function not as decorative excess but as magnetic points of affect, drawing the viewer into an unstable field between tenderness and discomfort.

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.

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

"Los volcanes despiertos" (The Awakened Volcanoes), the solo exhibition of Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra at MALBA (Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires), offers a rare and compelling journey through nearly four decades of drawing, sculpture, and installation. Curated by Raphael Fonseca, Latin American art curator at the Denver Art Museum, the show is the artist’s first major retrospective in Latin America, following her participation in the 59th Venice Biennale and the reception of the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2023.

between May 12, 2022 – June 5, 2022

Photo credits - the Art Museum in Cluj-Napoca