Curated by Ruba Katrib

The work of Teresa Burga, a Peruvian Conceptualist and founding member of the late 1960s Grupo Arte Nuevo, is being showcased at SculptureCenter in the artist’s first US solo museum exhibition, which will present approximately ten pieces that span her entire, ongoing career. Prominent among these will be Burga’s 1968 “Prisma” sculptures, multicolored plywood polyhedrons covered in painted symbols—from schematic faces to abstract geometries to traffic signs—that evoke the artist’s distinct Pop sensibility and reflect her interest in information systems. The compositional inventiveness of these works is carried through to more recent drawings for which Burga copied children’s art; the originals and her reinterpretations are displayed together as diptychs. Catalogue essays by curator Katrib and writer and curator Miguel A. López shed light on the artist’s singular marrying of the feminist and the childlike, as evinced in her sculpture series “Mano mal dibujada” (Poorly Drawn Hand), 2015, steel-frame constructions of the titular appendage topped with ruby-red-varnished nails.

— Kaira M. Cabañas