New Genres: retrospective

"Dreaming of Water", the retrospective exhibition of the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña

January 25, 2024 | nadiaevangelina

"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.

Malba

This is the most complete exhibition dedicated to date to the poet, visual artist, and feminist activist. It offers a reading of Vicuña's work from the South of America. It reviews sixty years of her production, highlighting her links with her native Argentina, the Andes Mountains, pre-Columbian textile memory, feminist struggles, and eroticism, as well as the demands for self-determination of indigenous communities.

The name of the exhibition represents an invitation to change our relationship with the earth: "Without humidity, there is no humanity", in the artist's words. Vicuña's creations are not only testimonies of the past but above all witnesses of an open future, just as this retrospective presents her work as an experience that is not definitive, but alive and in process.

Malba

At the beginning of the tour is his early work that has never been shown before abstract paintings, a work dedicated to Salvador Allende, and erotic drawings. Everything is poetry, each painting has a typed page next to it where the artist explains its meaning. Flower power is condensed in the painting Janis Joe, 1971, collection of Eduardo Costantini: Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker, naked women protesting, animality, Andean philosophy, blues, myths and folklore, the activist Angela Davis.

The site-specific installation Quipu menstrual (The Blood of the Glaciers), the only piece created especially for this exhibition, is presented in the museum's level -1 hall. It was conceived as a way of expressing support for Michelle Bachelet, Chile's first woman president. Four artists worked in dialogue with the artist and curator Verónica Rossi. The fleece hanging from the ceiling, on which images of native textiles are projected, still smells of sheep from three regions of the country, as Vicuña requested. The weavers, Guillermina Baiguera, Laura Morales, Adriana Pavic, and Ana Paula Méndez, kneaded it for two months in the museum.

Quipu menstrual

Political activism is a constant in her work. Vicuña was born into a family persecuted for its ideas; he is the third generation of exiles. As an example, there is the nucleus dedicated to Tribu No, a Santiago group of young artists and poets with whom he sought political freedom to create. The Palabrarmas are sculptural, performative, and spatial poems, word games that reveal meanings. The Precarios are another constant in his trajectory: small assemblages made of wood, pebbles, feathers, or treasures washed up by the sea or the river, offerings or refuge for microscopic life. Vicuña calls them "ritual performances", "spatial metaphors" and "multidimensional poems".

"Dreaming Water" updates Vicuña's commitment to popular struggles, respect for human rights, and the importance of opposing devastation in a broad sense.

Malba

"Dreaming of Water"

Location: Malba, Junín 1930, Av. Pres. Figueroa Alcorta 3415, C1425CLA CABA, Buenos Aires (Argentina)

Opening Date: 8th December 2023

End Date:26th February 2024

Working hours: Wednesday-Monday: 12pm to 8pm

Official website:

https://www.malba.org.ar/

https://www.instagram.com/museomalba/

Mentioned Artists:

Cecilia Vicuña

Argentina

Christo and Jeanne-Claude at Proa Foundation: legendary couple of Land Art

June 27, 2022 | nadiaevangelina

"Christo and Jeanne-Claude" is an amazing retrospective exhibition held at Proa Foundation, an exhibition center located in the heart of La Boca, a neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Throughout four rooms, models, designs, and drawings of the works of the artist couple, exponents of the Land art movement, originated during the 60s, are exhibited.

"Surrounded Islands" (1980-83)

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were two artists of the public and monumental, remembered for their environmental art installations. The most characteristic of this duo was the use of fabrics to wrap gigantic buildings or cover extensive natural areas. They were pioneers of Land Art; an artistic current arising from conceptual and minimalist art whose purpose is to create art in nature, using its materials and location in natural environments. Therefore, documentation is the only thing that remains of these works.

From their works, a hybrid between sculpture and architecture, the artists created an ecological conscience that disapproves of the irresponsibility and excesses of capitalism. Thus, hosting this exhibition at Proa Foundation is logical. The building's transparent façade allows communicating experiences from the inside to the outside, building a direct dialogue with the emblematic Riachuelo River, which is one of Argentina's most serious environmental problems.

"Wrapped Cans" (1959)

Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Credits: Proa Foundation

"Little Bay" (1969)

View from Proa Foundation

The exhibition "Christo and Jeanne-Claude" shows the process of their creation through the drawings, technical complexity, models, gigantic photographs of their work, and photos of the monumental projects that amazed the crowds. Entering the first room, we find the works of the mid 50's when Christo arrived in Paris: magazines wrapped in transparent vinyl, the showcases of some stores, and various objects before the works in the public space.

The tour continues with the monumental simultaneous projects during the 70s and 80s, a very fruitful artistic period. Among them are "Surrounded Islands", eleven islands with pink propylene fabric that could be seen from different places; "Valley Curtain" in Colorado, a sort of curtain between two orange mountains; or the disturbing "Wrapped Reichstag" in Berlin, a work that alludes to freedom since in the 50s Christo had escaped from communist Bulgaria.

"Valley Curtain" (1972)

"Wrapped Reichstag" (1995)

Another of the wonders on display is the famous floating dock of yellow fabric whose color changed according to the time of day on Lake Iseo in Sulza, Italy, where more than 10,000 people "walked on the water", an unforgettable physical experience. The sketches give an approximate idea of the scale on which they worked, the meters of canvas used, and the technical difficulties they faced, as in the case of "The Gates" in New York's Central Park, a 37-kilometer stretch of the park with orange canvases, a project that took 26 years to complete and was seen by around 4 million people during the 16 days the installation lasted in 2005.

The retrospective exhibition closes with a project that could not be carried out due to the artist's death, but will probably be inaugurated in the future. The project consists of installing "mastabas" in different parts of the world, monumental sculptures made of oil barrels. There are also "The Umbrellas", blue umbrellas for Japan, and yellow umbrellas for California among others that arouse astonishment.