Notes related to Museums

The acclaimed Korean artist Kimsooja will inaugurate on Wednesday September 22nd the last part of her trilogy of simultaneous exhibitions through which she landed in Buenos Aires. Chapter 3: Kimsooja. An inner experience arrives at the Korean Cultural Center in the Argentine capital as a part of Bienalsur 2021, the biennial that emerged at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero and that now takes place simultaneously in more than 124 venues, 23 countries and 50 cities around the world, with the participation of about 400 artists.

Gertrudes Altschul (1904–1962) was a pioneering figure in Brazilian modernist photography. Despite being acknowledged in the field in Brazil, her work is known only in specialized circles, having been scantly published and exhibited—something that this exhibition, the first in a museum, and its publication intend to rectify.

Olga de Amaral has pioneered her own visual language within the fiber arts movement. Her radical experimentation with color, form, material, composition, and space transforms weaving from a flat design element into an architectural component that defies the confines of any genre or medium.

The New York premiere of the exhibition Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams traces the groundbreaking history and legacy of the House of Dior. The exhibition brings to life Dior's many sources of inspiration—from the splendor of flowers and other natural forms to classical and contemporary art.

The Museum of Art of Lima - MALI presents this exhibition of the outstanding Peruvian artist curated by the historian and art critic Luis Eduardo Wuffarden. Based on the so-called mixed race paintings commissioned by Viceroy Manuel de Amat y Junyent and sent to the King of Spain Carlos III in 1770, Sandra Gamarra commissioned their reproduction to a copyists' workshop in China. On these she added quotes from different contemporary feminist thinkers. In response to the absence of original works in Peru, this series, made up of twenty paintings, has been donated by LiMac to the MALI collection of contemporary art.

When artists, designers, industry resources, and clients work together, common places are transformed into spectacular spaces. CODAworx, the hub of the commissioned art economy, has announced the winners of the ninth annual international CODAawards: Collaboration of Design + Art. The CODAawards recognize collaborations that result in outstanding projects which successfully integrate commissioned art into interior, architectural, or public spaces.

José Luis Landet has been searching for the image of the Latin American landscape for years. And in El Atajo (The Shortcut), the exhibition that he presents in Marco, he finds some ways of approaching that idea. He builds ramps, connects vestiges, shreds colors, traces identikits, joins random images, creates an alphabet ... and ends up building a total idea of ​​our landscape, but above all of another subject that also haunts him: the painting. There is a large installation, a physical shortcut, and a set of 467 works that point to something that is clear in the subtitle: a displacement in the author.

The all-female group exhibition examines the mainstream portrayal of women, confronting the stereotypes, violence, limitations, and ideals imposed on the disputed image of the female body. Featuring 23 diverse female artists, the works in the show come together to address contemporary discussions on gender, race, body politics, resilience, and self-representation amid today’s social landscape.

The project, by Luz María Bedoya, explores multidisciplinary relationships between navigation, sound and writing. It has a digital platform and a physical installation in MALI.

This is the first solo exhibition held in a Brazilian museum dedicated to the work of Erika Verzutti (São Paulo, 1971). Verzutti’s work is essential to an understanding of sculpture as it is practiced today, in Brazil and internationally. Her thought-provoking forms explore new possibilities for the medium, to the origin and materiality of sculpture, as well as its formal intelligence.

The Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) presents the second of three exhibitions that forms part of their research theme Female Identities in the Global South.

The third edition of the Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo del Sur (BIENALSUR) organized by the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), an Argentine public university, will take place until December 2021 in more than 120 venues in 50 cities in 23 countries and the Vatican, with the participation of around 400 artists of various nationalities and different backgrounds.

This alliance opens the opportunity to promote a collaboration that hopes to be very beneficial for the cultural sector, marked by the beginning of the necessary dialogue to build a new model in market relations, museums and galleries.

Until September 15, the call is open to Colombian or foreign artists with more than 15 years of experience to present an artistic intervention in the Fragmentos space, created by Doris Salcedo. The award consists of one hundred and sixty million Colombian pesos ($160,000,000 m/cte).

Power Station of Art (Shanghai) and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris) present the exhibition Trees. With more than 200 artworks from over 30 artists from China, Latin America, India, Iran and Europe, the exhibition celebrates trees and their influence on contemporary art.

The Museum of Modern Art Bogota presents I dreamt the landscape was looking at me, by Jessica Mitrani in in collaboration with Alex Czetwertynski. It is optical device that invites the viewer on a hypnotic journey suspended between reality and fiction, personal and public, resulting in a spontaneous and non-linear narrative.

Known for their fantastical and improvisational approach to puppetry, Poncilí Creación is an art collective composed of identical twin brothers Pablo and Efrain Del Hierro who describe their practice as “speculative alchemy.” For their newly commissioned performance Somxs Podemx, the group takes to the streets for a durational progression across the neighborhoods of San Juan, the duo’s hometown and where they have been in quarantine during the global pandemic.

Organized in celebration of the Rose’s 60th anniversary, the exhibition re: collections, Six Decades at the Rose Art Museum highlights the Rose’s radical roots while showcasing the potential for future transformations. Following the example of artists featured in the exhibition, re: collections challenges art historical conventions and cultural hierarchies by charting alternative genealogies that link artworks drawn from the museum’s stellar permanent collection.

The General Council of the MACBA Consortium has appointed her as the new director, valuing her contribution of “an innovative look at the role of the museum on the local and international scene, also incorporating a clear desire to connect with contemporary debates on the role of art in this beginning of the century, without avoiding a clear commitment to the social problems that surround cultural institutions”.

Three recent works by Cecilia Bengolea (b. 1979, Buenos Aires) are featured. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice merges video, choreography, and sculpture. Following the thread of water and movement flows, this exhibition presents a selection of works where the artist’s reflection on dance, the sensorial interplay between the body’s interiority and its surroundings, as well as the rhythmical relations of social communities and nature, symptomatically manifest through the choreographic language.

The Argentine curator, with experience in renowned museums such as the Moderno in Buenos Aires and Malba, joins the arteBA team.

A lavish, satirical and vertigo-inducing meditation on the Hollywood ‘Dream Factory,’ Heaven’s Gate is a work of digital psychedelia employing the same state-of-the-art computer compositing technology as the films it references. On view at the Pérez Art Museum Miami until early 2022.

Part of the “Normal Exceptions” solo shows programme, La Restauradora (The Restorer)  tells the story of Mexico City over 800 years from the geographic perspective of a location at the city’s heart.

Within the ambitious Collection reorganization that the Reina Sofía Museum is carrying out, the nucleus Los enemigos de la poesía: Resistencias en América Latina (The enemies of poetry: Resistances in Latin America) is presented, focused on Latin art produced between 1964 and 1987 and its relationship with Spain. The political transformations of the time and the appearance of new artistic practices, such as mail art, favored a series of transcendental exchanges for the future of contemporary art.

Organized by the Museo Reina Sofía and curated by Manuel Borja-Villel, the exhibition proposes a scheme where each canvas maintains its own autonomy as a work of art, but also remains in close connection with the rest of the pieces, in a kind of evocative ecosystem of climatic, sensory and emotional experiences. In this sense, Suter's canvases hang, without a frame, in installations that seek an immediate relationship with the architectural and natural space, while inevitably referring to the environment in which they were created.

The exhibition aims to explore the influence of Iberian art in Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre through more tan 200 pieces. Organised with the Musée national Picasso-Paris and curated by Cécile Godefroy and Roberto Ontañón Peredo, this stimulating, original exhibition invites visitors to reflect on how the discovery of a native, “primitive”, art shaped the artistic language and identity of one of the greatest artists in the twentieth century.

His painting Y me quedé sin nombre (1974) is the first work by a Dominican-born New York artist to be acquired by the museum.

The Whitney Museum of American Art at New York announces that assistant curators Marcela Guerrero and Rujeko Hockley have been promoted to newly endowed positions. Guerrero has been appointed the Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator and Rujeko Hockley will assume the role of Arnhold Associate Curator, both effective July 1.

The Rafael Tous Collection, donated to MACBA (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona) just one year ago, is the portrait of a moment and specific artistic practices. A passionate collector linked to the textile world, Rafael Tous opted for conceptual art as a set of plural practices that prioritized the idea and the process over the object. Without speculative intention and in an intuitive way, Tous set up a collection that brings together the attitudes and experimental works of a group of artists with whom, in many cases, he established bonds of friendship, in addition to accompanying them in their artistic growth. Exhibition curated by: Antònia Maria Perelló, curator and head of the MACBA Collection, and Claudia Segura, curator of exhibitions and Collection.

The future Chief Curator of MALBA highlights: "After two decades of prestigious work, Malba consolidates a central trajectory for the local scene and of reference at a regional and international level." María Amalia García explains, and adds: “Maintaining a Latin American perspective around artistic processes entails the commitment to recognize and value the specificities of each region and abandon the pigeonholes in foreign categories. (…) I understand that the reinvention that museums face today has to integrate and promote plural and diverse knowledge and perceptively enable dissident modes”.