Happenings

Artist: Bernardo Ortiz 

Borrar
May 18, 2016 – October 9, 2016
Museo de Arte Moderno 
Buenos Aires, Argentina

La obra de Bernardo Ortiz (Bogotá, Colombia, 1972) explora los territorios del dibujo, la escritura y la tipografía, y cruza la delicada frontera entre la obra de arte que se crea escribiendo y el dibujo que forma parte de un texto mayor: el de la práctica cotidiana del artista.

Ortiz es un artista preocupado por el acto de ver y sus dobleces. Con su trabajo, nos invita a agudizar la mirada y a preguntarnos cómo se construye una imagen y qué constituye una obra de arte. Y nos provoca abiertamente al titular su exposición Borrar.

Para esta exhibición en el Moderno, Bernardo Ortiz ha producido una estructura arquitectónica especialmente diseñada para la ocasión, con el objetivo de permitir el despliegue de obras y dibujos. El espectador recorrerá la instalación descubriendo las operaciones poéticas de un artista dedicado obsesivamente a hacer posibles nuevos vínculos entre el texto y la imagen, que dejan de lado toda grandilocuencia para enfatizar la importancia del pequeño gesto artístico cotidiano y su potencial de transformación.

Ortiz se define como “dibujante” y señala: “Siempre he pensado que el dibujo permite mantener viva la potencialidad de lo que no fue hecho. Dibujar es una forma de hacer visible algo que todavía no existe del todo. Una ingeniera diseñando un puente, alguien que dibuja un mapa para otra persona, etc.”.

Sus medios son simples: una hoja de papel, un retazo de seda, una computadora portátil, tinta o un lápiz negro y duro. Esta modestia de recursos impone un ritual riguroso para la creación de ciertos trabajos: el regreso cotidiano a diversas series de obras a través de las cuales el artista se compromete a usar el dibujo para hacer visible el paso del tiempo.

Artist: Emilia Azcárate

Full Emptiness / El vacío lleno
May 27, 2016 – July 30, 2016
Miami Biennale
Miami, Florida

Azcárate’s works on paper, canvas and board, present unique forms of conceptualizing and synthesizing her spirituality and artistic practice. The installations shown in the gallery space highlight color, concentric compositions and forms of calligraphy and serve as a visual counterpoint to the permanent installation of James Turrell’s Coconino (2007). The disciplines of Azcárate’s meditation practice carry her through her art making, providing a structure that allows for the blurring between internal reflection and participation in the frenetic activity of contemporary society.

Artists: Esvin Alarcón Lam, tepeu choc, Diana de Solares, Darío Escobar, Patrick Hamilton.

Overlap/ Traslape
Opens June 1, 2016
The 9.99 Gallery 
Guatemala City, Guatemala

Three dialogues are established with three different processes that relate to the idea of overlapping and superimposing elements, time, generations, and actions:

The first dialogue is a interaction in relation to mostly urban landscape in combination with the materials used.

Alejandro Almanza Pereda presents “Horror Vacui (Escena invernal No.1)” [Winter Scene No.1] (2014). From a snowy landscape, Almanza Pereda builds a cement structure that extends beyond the work’s frame to cover the entire wall. The seemingly accidental look of the quasi-action-painting-type dripping acquires a new connotation due to the material and the space extending beyond the painting.

In the same manner, Esvin Alarcón Lam’s  “Desplazamiento No.9” [Displacement No.9] (2016) also plays with the space outside the frame. Like a passageway leading to another dimension, the work created out of bus parts establishes an  association between the urban landscape and public transportation.

This dialogue ends with tepeu choc’s “Registration No.1” (2016) made out of the plastic material utilized in the informal economy. In it, a series of cut outs call to mind construction tool silhouettes.

The second dialogue is established by the works’s geometric elements such as line, figure, and volume.

Darío Escobar’s “Quetzalcoatl IV” (2004) plays with notions of stability between the undulating bicycle tires, as they surrender their circular shape to gravity laws, and the bronze counterweights.

The piece by Luis Diaz, “The Gukumatz in person” (1971), like Escobar’s work, references the (serpent) deity’s undulating movement: this time in its Quiché appellation, and in a more stable manner derived from flexible wooden sections that adapt to different crawling movements. These sharp forms make a return to verticality in “Chuzo” (2012-2016), a construction-tool-like work by Patrick Hamilton.

In “Sin título” (Untitled) (2015), a drawing by Diana de Solares, assorted color layers generate movement related to air and the kind found in children’s pinwheels. Thus, varying elements of nature come together and overlap in this work.

Finally, the third overlapping dialogue emerges between a spiritual perspective  and the physical body. The indigo and turquoise of Sandra Monterroso’s cotton yarn, “Expoliada III” (Despoiled III) (2016) series, colors associated with water, represent the varying tonalities of rainfall through time.

Meanwhile, in Isabel Ruiz’s “Vuelo de las Mariposas” (Flight of Butterflies) (2016 ), the set of opposing crutches reminds us of the body’s fragility: The before-and-after of a transition between what is natural and what the fire has consumed.

In Diego Sagastume’s photographs, we return to the urban landscape of painted walls and open skies whose tonalities show the passage of time, also found in Christian Lord’s “(Mira)anda IV” ((Look)go IV) (2015), a work that through wordplay, invites us to contemplation and to walk, suggested by the circle’s forward movement.

Artist: Cristina Ghetti

stripe – generators
May 19, 2016 – July 30, 2016
Galería Punto
Valencia, Spain

Artists: Emilia Azcárate, Emilio Chapela, Eduardo Costa, Jaime Davidovich, Diana de Solares, Karina Peisajovich, Osvaldo Romberg, Luis Roldán, Eduardo Santiere, Horacio Zabala.

Imagining Spaces: Constructions in Color and Text
June 23, 2016 – August 19, 2016
Henrique Faria
New York, NY

Imagining Spaces: Constructions in Color and Text, a group exhibition focused on the formal and thematic elements of color and text in Latin American art of the last sixty years. The exhibition framework is based on the premise that color and text are two major building blocks of creative expression, and can therefore be seen as architectural components of a given composition.