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Mapplethorpe, Kuropatwa and Grete Stern: great artists to question the temporal and the eternal

Mapplethorpe, Kuropatwa and Grete Stern: great artists to question the temporal and the eternal

(By Mercedes Ezquiaga) With works by more than 40 national and international artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Alejandro Kuropatwa, Grete Stern, Luciana Lamothe or Matilde Marín, the Recoleta Cultural Center has just inaugurated “Brief History of Eternity”, an exhibition with pieces lent by different collections in the most diverse supports such as installation, painting, sculpture, photography and drawing, which eloquently expose and interrogate the temporal and the eternal.

“Borges and Bifo Berardi are the helm of this exhibition. The works address the idea of ​​plenitude as an escape from the ideals of an intolerant and oppressive society,” summarizes the exhibition’s curator, Daniel Fischer, during a visit to the press by the space, which invites a spiral path, as if in circles, delimiting different climates, but also labyrinthine circuits.

It is probably one of the most disruptive ways in which the assembly of works has ever been shown and the tour inside the Cronopios room but also together with its surroundings, the rectangular rooms J and C, which for the first time communicate from the heart of the space, from the inside, as walls were torn down like never before in the history of the historic cultural center.

It is precisely these new “passages”, these new portals, which allow, once you reach the bottom of the Cronopios room, to be able to go to room J and C -without having to return to the entrance as always- and it is precisely that new union that turns the exhibition hall into something monumental with different stages, with different climates, gloomy and intimate in the center, much brighter and more colorful on the sides. And in turn, as brief curatorial axes, with some works more linked to the earthly, others to the heroic, the mystical, nature, the vital.

“The exhibition is a portal to think about time, care, the eternal, the ephemeral, the migrant and we find, for example, symbolism through the work of Catalina León (on astrology), the dreamlike in Santiago Viale, the religious in Alejandro Kuropatwa, order and chaos in Robert Mapplethorpe”, describes the curator of the show, who also quotes Borges, for whom eternity “is a splendid artifice that frees us, even fleetingly, from the intolerable oppression of the successive”, an appointment comprehensive enough to be able to gather such a number of names, with works lent by private and public collections.

A disturbing climate greets the visitor as soon as they enter the Cronopios, where the monumental structure of the artist Luciana Lamothe is located, a “sculpture” that results from a series of wooden planks supported by tabular forms: you can cross it on foot, after going up some stairs, but the scaffolding sways as you walk and put both the walker’s balance and the characteristics of the material to the test.

Directly opposite, the artist Matilde Marín recounts the details of her mural, made of thousands of handmade golden papers, in which the image of the immense smoke generated by an explosion in the Pacific Ocean is projected threateningly: “It is a work based on in news that for many years I collected and that has to do with smoke. For a long time my inspiration came from the news, and this smoke is projected on these papers, small models made by hand with natural papers and therefore do not pollute” , says the artist about her work “Not too far”, from the series “When I saw the blue smoke of Ithaca”: “It was the place where Ulysses arrived and it is the destination where we as inhabitants of this world have to arrive” Marin details.

Before, the artist Graciela Taquini, a pioneer of video art, refers to her work present in the exhibition, where she proposes to the visitor a rhetorical question that interrogates “When does your future begin”, accustomed in her works to emphasize the domestic spheres, the affective bonds and complicities.

“With the power of a brief, rhizomatic, illuminated ray, the room’s metaphors eloquently expose and interrogate the temporal and the eternal,” Fischer notes of the ensemble, including large-scale installations and more than twenty works in different supports.

The artist Gabriela Golder, also present during the tour, expounds on her video work “Rebelliones”, a video piece made in homage to the series of prints “Your story, partner” (1933), by the engraver and lithographer Guillermo Facio Hebequer: “It is a contemporary reading of those emblematic lithographs, where I wanted to capture the gestures that appear in an instance of struggle. In that work the painter questioned poverty, the impossibility of feeding your children, until in one of the lithographs, there is a break and someone raises a fist in the air. The crowd thinks that something can change”, he develops during his talk.

Disassembled, fragmented and in parts supported by the room, the “Archaeology of my body” by the artist Nushi Muntaabski, who works with glass and mosaics, is exhibited, a monumental sculpture of a woman who, fully armed, measures twelve meters high and stands she saw in 2014 at the entrance to the Fortabat Museum, in Puerto Madero, recalls the artist.

Returning to Borges, the exhibition seeks to resonate with the concept of eternity and “an unfathomable and affective human need that seeks to calm the desire for events of one’s own and that of others”, in the words of the curator, “a small portal to access to all the spaces, all the possibilities and all the stories and histories of a complex, ductile and brilliant society”, as he wrote in the entry text to the room.

For her part, the artist Catalina León presents “Rain, impredictive astrology” on the floor of the Cronopios room, a participatory project that seeks to rethink the imaginaries of traditional and psychological astrology, as well as its practical use for life through a an immense game board, to “know you and not know you”, in his own words, very close to the enveloping “Tapestry of Lost Words” by Pablo Lehmann.

Also appearing there, in rooms J and C, are the dreams of Grete Stern, the searches through the writing of the French Sophie Calle, the textiles of Chiachio and Giannone, the photographs of Alejandro Kuropatwa, those of Robert Mapplethorpe, the fur human being imagined by Nicola Costantino, to name just a few.

The collective exhibition “Brief History of Eternity” can be visited until September at the Recoleta Cultural Center, Junín 1930, with free admission, from Tuesday to Friday from 1:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. and on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays from 11:15 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Source: Ambito

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