New Genres: September 2024

Aída Carballo's legacy at the Museum of La Cárcova in Buenos Aires

September 25, 2024 | nadiaevangelina

The exhibition “Aída Carballo: An Open Door to the Infinite” celebrates the legacy of the Argentine artist, known especially for the unique style of her engravings in which she combines elements of everyday life with a deep social commitment, as well as her teaching role. The proposal, held at the Museum of La Cárcova, is curated by Lucía Laumann, author of the book “Aída Carballo, teacher: Graphic Production and Institutional Paths in Buenos Aires in the Second Half of the 20th Century”.

Aída Carballo. Museum of La Cárcova

The exhibition brings together engravings, drawings, documents, ceramics, and photographs, organized into three sections: “La Cárcova”, which focuses on her time at the Ernesto de la Cárcova School of Fine Arts; “The Soul of the City”, which shows her ways of inhabiting urbanity that, in some way, was reflected in her work, and “Between the classrooms and the workshop”, dedicated to her job as a teacher.

The Museum of La Cárcova previously functioned as the Ernesto de la Cárcova School of Fine Arts, a key training instance for the artist. Hence, the exhibition space becomes a key player in her artistic career. This takes on greater importance in the “La Cárcova” nucleus, focusing on the artist's training since her youth.

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. Museum of La Cárcova

Finally, “Between the Classrooms and the Workshop” focuses on the more than thirty years she devoted to teaching. Since the mid-fifties and for more than thirty years, Carballo taught several generations of artists. She taught Drawing, Engraving, and History of Engraving at the Manuel Belgrano and Prilidiano Pueyrredón National Schools of Fine Arts. She also organized student exhibitions, gave lectures, and supported student projects and demands. Her participation in these activities reflects the place she occupied as a reference in artistic education. This bond with her students was recorded in some of her prints, where their faces are represented. Carballo's artistic and teaching performance was also engraved in the memory of the new generations of artists.

“Aída Carballo: An Open Door to the Infinite”

Location: Museum of La Cárcova, Av. España 1701, CABA, Buenos Aires (Argentina)

Opening Date: 10th August 2024

End Date: 27th October 2024

Working hours: Tuesday-Sunday: 10am to 5pm

Official website: https://museodelacarcova.una.edu.ar/

https://www.instagram.com/museodelacarcova.una/

Artist:

Aída Carballo

art fair

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Argentina

Contemporary Mexican art arrives in Buenos Aires

September 06, 2024 | nadiaevangelina

Fundación Proa, located in the neighborhood of La Boca (Buenos Aires), presented “Espejos de México” (Mirrors of Mexico), with emblematic works by Mexican contemporary artists Julieta Aranda, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Damián Ortega. The works propose universal readings on human issues (personal and social) and the relationship with technologies (uses and customs).

Damian Ortega

The exhibition proposes an atypical symbiosis, through artists of the same generation who were first recognized internationally before being recognized at home, who enter from different perspectives in the fragmentation; the sum of the parts that can compose an idea -nation, vocabulary, history, industry, etc- but that does not stop being an illusion and that has self-construction as its axis. Thus, in the different spaces you can visit the video installation of Julieta Aranda, the “constructed” works of Abraham Cruzvillegas, the multimedia art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and the expanded art of Damián Ortega.

At the entrance is “Stealing one's corpse” (an alternative set of support points for an ascent to darkness), where Julieta Aranda (1975) proposes, through a video and installations, “a science fiction story that problematizes about freedom”, based on “traps for animals of different types and times”. According to the exhibition organizers, the artist “investigates the link between the prey and the predator, with the figure of the human being, from her point of view, crossed by this duality: he is both the hunter and the hunted. So, he argues, there is no way out, except madness”.

Julieta Aranda

In the next room, Abraham Cruzvillegas (1968) presents a series of paintings on large canvases, drawings with familiarity to shodō, five canvases made for the exhibition and intervened being on the floor with a broom, a mural collage with papers that he has accumulated for 3 decades, which is the only one made in Mexico; and sculptures created for the show from leftovers of metallurgical plants and natural materials, such as earth. For the artist, all these works are considered self-portraits.

Next is “Matriz de voz”, a sound-visual piece by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (1967), the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale in 2007, who specializes in the production of platforms for public participation, in which through technology - robotic lights, digital sources, computerized surveillance, multimedia walls, and telematic networks - he manages, as in this case, to generate transhuman perspectives. The work is a luminous system deployed horizontally, which flickers from the reproduction of some 800 recorded voices that fuse. At one end, the visitor can press the intercom button on an electric buzzer system to enter a phrase into the choir, which begins to replicate and slowly disappears into the chorus.

Finally, on the second floor of the La Boca space, Damián Ortega (1967) presents “Cosmic Thing”, an expanded art piece that has traveled the world, in which he dissects a '98 Volkswagen Beetle to suspend its parts in space, creating a sort of frozen explosion that suggests both the deconstruction of the piece and the fragmentation of the ideas it represents. In addition, a video installation “Sobre Escarabajo” (On Beetle) is presented, in which a funerary burial of the Beetle he had inherited from his father is observed.