Reviews

It is difficult to partake of two fine art disciplines. Antonio Ugarte (Venezuela, 1961) is a photographer and a painter. The exhibition “Sombras de museo” (“Museum Shadows”) is based on his inquiries into photography.

Starting with its title, this exhibition rescues an almost forgotten chapter in the global history of geometric abstraction, which was the axis of the modernist dream in Spain.

In his presentation in Buenos Aires, Humberto Vélez (Panamá, 1965) exhibits, in the first place, the film The Last Builder (El último físicoculturista / El último constructor), 2008, with Dionisio Herrera González in the leading role, showing his sculpted body to the sound of Nikola Kodjabashia’s music.

Amalia Caputo (Venezuela, 1964) has an obsession with objects. This does not apply only to found objects, but also to those which are sought, used, discarded, and whose eventual role, assigned to them by the new users, she wants to keep track of..

In the year 2000, artist Glenda León (Havana, 1976) left small frozen flowers inside ice cubes upon the tables of a bar.

Over the course of art history, artists aligned with different trends have shown a fascination with maps.

The work of Adriana Minoliti (Buenos Aires, 1980) attracted attention when she won the Currículum Cero Award (2004), organized by Ruth Benzacar gallery.

Large grey and black pixels amassed an indistinguishable image that appeared macroscopic in relation to the scale of human bodies sharing the space.

Hayward Gallery, London, is featuring work by 22 international artists in its recently inaugurated exhibition, Light Show, a tour that starts in the 1960s, a time when alliances between art, science and technology began to be forged; when artists on both sides of the Atlantic began to investigate light and its power to transform the perception of space.

A dose of humility and humor: this is what characterizes the work of Iván Argote (Bogotá, 1983), a young Colombian artist based in Paris.

In a closed space, everyday situations become altered. The order in which we have built a figuration of the world then provides us a dramatic quality, a theatricality which manifests itself through increasingly reduced and repetitive statements.

Carlos Huffmann (Buenos Aires, 1980) establishes diverse yet unavoidable relationships between the image and the word in La juventud de los ancestros, shown in Ruth Benzacar gallery.

Paper Folding, Odalis Valdivieso’s most recent series, is an interesting pun. And I say this based not only on the complex ad infinitum process of manual and digital manipulation which underpins the work, and which conceals a constant postponement of its meaning, but on the innumerable revisions of artistic tradition itself that this series comprises.

An acrid smell hangs thickly in the air of the Mandragoras Art Space where the crowd sips on red wine in anticipation of legendary Colombian performance artist María Evelia Marmolejo.

Julian Navarro Projects presented “Power Ties”, the first comprehensive exhibition of this series of Guerra de la Paz’s work that spans the past seven years of art-making.

On entering the Chilean artist Iván Navarro’s (1972) exhibition Fluorescent Sculptures, the first reference was inevitably the work of Dan Flavin (1933- 1996), since the latter was the artist who pioneered the use of neon tubes as the main material in his work.

A bee-hive, a swarm, a concert of nests made from recycled materials make up a soft architecture installation titled Qué nos rodea ( What surrounds us?) .

101 Dresses is the Brazilian sculptor Adriana Carvalho’s most recent one-person exhibition. The show is a retrospective look at her work from the years when she was an artist-in-residence at the Art Center South Florida, in Miami Beach.

“Extranjeros para nosotros mismos” is the title under which, in 1991, Julia Kristeva inquired into the development of a type of multiracial coexistence in 21st-century Europe.

In the center of Santiago de Chile, González & González gallery exhibits the work of four of the most important Latin American artists of our days.

Looking at a decade of artistic production over forty years ago, Open Work in Latin America, New York & Beyond: Conceptualism Reconsidered, 1967-1978 features thirty-six artists affiliated with Latin America, making work on the continent, abroad or in a situation of transience.

In Retroceso el sueño dormido, Andrés Monteagudo (Spain, 1970) prolongs the influence of his native city, Granada, on his childhood, through a poetics of the white cube that dissolves the boundaries between art and life.

The scene Rompimiento de Gloria, in which a light source irrupts from behind some clouds, dominating the space and transforming it into a place for contemplation characteristic of the Baroque, provides the title for the exhibition presented by Miler Lagos at Espacio Odeón.

Throughout more than thirty years of conscientious artistic career, the work of Lydia Azout (Bogotá, 1942) has been characterized by her constant research into ontological problems that define our place on the planet as well as our relationship with nature.