Mariairis Flores Leiva

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  picks March 06, 2023

  Pablo Ferrer

  The first thing we see upon entering Pablo Ferrer’s exhibition of paintings “Repetitions” is a text by the artist in which he reflects on the value of repetition as reiteration and rehearsal. What follows are an assortment of the same scenes depicted in different formats with only small variations. And yet, even when you look multiple times at very similar images, it’s never quite clear what has transpired; instead, the artist immerses his viewers in a distinctively suburban interplay of memory and mystery.

  Ferrer’s paintings are figurative but not naturalistic. Shadows seep into the light, and

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  print September 2022

  Hernán Parada

  In 1973, a military coup d’état rocked Chile, rendering imprisonment, torture, and disappearance daily occurrences. This repeated assault on the social fabric motivated hundreds of people to take to the streets in protest of the lack of information about their relatives. To this day, the military has yet to address the fate of the missing, but their disappearance has affected the country profoundly.

  Curated by Alejandro de la Fuente, the exhibition “OBRABIERTA: El tiempo, la vida, la información” (OBRABIERTA: Time, Life, Information) focused on an ongoing body of work that Hernán Parada started

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  print February 2022

  Sylvia Palacios Whitman

  Born and raised in Chile, Sylvia Palacios Whitman developed her work in New York beginning in the early 1970s. This exhibition, “Alrededor del borde/Around the Edge,” marked its first presentation in her home country. Curator Jennifer McColl Crozier brought together sketches, objects, performance documentation, and press clippings that made it possible for visitors to enter the universe constructed by the artist.

  Although she briefly studied visual art at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Santiago, Palacios Whitman would take dance as her primary medium. She called the presentations of her work in

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  print January 2022

  Claudia Gutiérrez

  Santiago, like many of the world’s capitals, is an excessively dense city. Roughly 40 percent of Chile’s population lives there, with the greatest concentration living on the outskirts of the metropolis. Claudia Gutiérrez reconstructs images of this urban periphery through the practice of embroidery, a medium still too often typically relegated to the category of “women’s work.” Her exhibition “No hay cielo sin nubes” (There Is No Sky Without Clouds) featured ten untitled pieces (all works 2021) that addressed, in different ways, the cityscape that inspired them, while also demonstrating the

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  picks July 02, 2021

  Antonia Bañados

  Science has long turned to nature as a model for how to produce representations of phenomena that we cannot immediately observe with the naked eye. Artist Antonia Bañados continues this tradition with the exhibition “Campo del Cielo” (Field of Heaven), which takes its name from a meteorite-ridden stretch of northern Argentina. In her paintings, drawings, and ceramic sculptures, Bañados conflates the falling meteors with drops of liquid, creating forms that are neither one, nor the other. The charcoal-and-gouache-on-paper Lluvia de meteoritos (Meteor Shower), 2018, depicts craggy black splotches

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  print April 2021

  “The Forgotten Exhibition and a Reading of Four Chilean Artists”

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  picks March 31, 2021

  Ximena Zomosa

  Upon entering Ximena Zomosa’s exhibition “Anónimas,” the viewer is immediately dwarfed by two giant housedresses suspended from equally oversize hangers so that their skirts spread out over the floor. Across the room are ten more hangers, all draped with women’s garments measuring more than sixteen feet long and six feet wide and arranged in two rows that fill the space. It feels as if we’ve invaded the closet of a giantess. Or rather, of many giantesses, as each dress suggests a distinct occupation or identity: maid, schoolgirl, housewife, secretary, homegrown produce seller, a profession common

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  picks November 13, 2020

  Felipe Rivas San Martín

  Homosexuality was decriminalized in Chile 1999, around the same time that the concept of “sexual diversity” entered the national consciousness. For thirteen years, LGBTQIA+ artist and activist Felipe Rivas San Martín has produced a body of work critical of the idea that certain sexualities are “deviant.” Curated by Antonio Urrutia Luxoro, “Estatutos de la disidencia” (Statutes of Dissidence), revisits more than a decade of Rivas San Martín’s production against the debate between liberal appeals for tolerance and “sexual diversity” and a radical politics of “sexual dissidence.”  

  In Hegemony,

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  print October/November 2020

  “Pensar todo de nuevo”

  The proliferation of online viewing rooms and live streaming since the global spread of Covid-19 has challenged us to rethink the time and space of the exhibition. Launched in May but in development since before the pandemic was known to have reached Argentina in March, “Pensar todo de nuevo” (Rethink Everything) became Rolf Art’s first show “conceived for an online format” (albeit with a physical version due to have opened by press time). The online presentation counteracts the limitations of screen-based exhibition formats by focusing on image-based works that translate effectively into the