Piranesi is the unavoidable precedent when it comes to prison architecture. But his were monumental prisons, in the spirit of the Settecento: phantasmagoric prisons, where the pictorial dramatism of the image was accentuated with full blacks that evoked the function of confinement. Piranesi's prisons were social, but Horacio Zabala's are individual cells: for artists intellectuals, and opponents in general: “My prisons tried to solve in advance the problem of building prisons for those who opposed him. And I put on paper the most atrocious ones I could think of: there were subway prisons, floating, elevated on columns, etc.,” the artist explained with irony.

Zabala's prisons are part of a long series of individual prisons that he began to create in 1972. The blueprints include various types of prisons, but in all of them, he used strictly architectural language to give them verisimilitude, so that the world can easily recognize them. It was an obsessive project and one that he pursued for quite some time. Later, Zabala created other metaphorical prisons. For example, the idea that paper or language are prisons. “Violence always seemed to me an art theme, it always attracted me. It is part of the human being, like tenderness or love,” the artist expanded. As for the prison metaphor, it makes us think of the need for isolation and silence to concentrate, as did the artist. There one is free: it is a contradiction, but a fruitful one. The form is seen as a prison and at the same time, the artist can move with full awareness and, in his way, with complete freedom within those limits.

The prisons projected by Zabala in the early seventies are works against violence and in a way, they not only speak of Argentine history but also anticipate the political violence that would follow soon after in the country and the rest of Latin America. Andrés Duprat, director of the MNBA, in the introductory text, states about the works of both artists that “in the extensive temporal arc that goes from modernity to contemporaneity, both seem to trace a perfect circle, a tale of the past, present and future hells to which the human condition can be subjected”.

In times when power in Argentina is exercised violently and inhumanly, the exhibition is in direct conflict with what all citizens are living, where there is little freedom.

Aída Carballo. Museum of La Cárcova

“The Soul of the City,” meanwhile, focuses on the city of Buenos Aires and the people who inhabit it, constants in Carballo's work. From the whirlwind of traffic with the characteristic bus to the neighborhood residents getting together, the heterogeneity of the city of Buenos Aires comes alive in her works. In many cases, she alludes to the social-political context. Such is the case of posters, part of urban visual culture, which had a particular boom during the sixties. Carballo first represented them in her prints and, towards the end of her life, they became a support to celebrate the return of democracy.

Aída Carballo