An exhibition reviews drawings and sketches from the 70s and 80s by Delia Cancela

On Wednesday, August 2, the Herlitzka & Co. gallery opens Catwalk (Pasarela), an exhibition by the renowned artist Delia cancels which brings together more than a hundred drawings and sketches, a record of performance, a dress and objects, historical works from the 70s and 80s, and others from the 90s, most of them rarely exhibited. In these pieces they inhabit from their most intimate world to their designs against the grain of the heteronormative gaze of the time.

Like on a catwalk the exhibition at Herlitzka & Co. immerses the viewer in the exuberant, playful and sensual universe that the artist created for men and women, and also in the portraits he made of close people. His designs show an inescapable performative dimension, and account for his particular avant garde vision.

“The idea of ​​working with the body and creating clothes, for me, was like making a sculpture, like when I now make a soft sculpture: I worked directly with the body,” says Cancela. And she adds about that moment: “As artists we were never interested in categories. Working in fashion was just like changing media.”

For Cancela, there is no division between art and fashion but rather a creative continuum: “To create images, since that is what it is about, the medium does not matter: what counts is to transmit ideas and emotions, using, for the artistic experience, regardless of painting, drawing, fashion, photography, video . That makes the work, due to its multiplicity, difficult to classify, but no less coherent for that”.

“With the same impulse and without making intellectual distinctions, with the same strength and originality and with an indisputable continuity, Delia Cancela has painted, drawn, created costumes and practiced, in her own way, fashion,” says Javier Arroyuelo, who wrote a column in Vogue Paris on art, literature, music and characters. For the specialist, Cancela’s is a sophisticated and wild aesthetic at the same time, like a fable for all ages.

The exhibition includes key works in the production of Cancela, an artist who actively participated in Di Tella and began to focus on fashion and to question the prevailing canons of the supposed female gaze. -and his conception of love and life- since the beginning of the sixties. Actresses, models and dancers participated in the fashion shows of its collections, uniting fashion and performance.

“The dresses were modified and, on some occasions, even finished during the session. The model’s face, makeup, hair participated in completing the style they proposed. His covers for Vogue functioned as an account of a creative project”, writes Horatio Goñi Rinaldini in the catalog of the Pablo & Delia exhibition, at the Judith Clark gallery in London (2001).

For Cancela, that period implied a leap that united art and life, where paintings came to life on clothes. “The dress becomes a canvas,” writes Goñi Rinaldini. The direct and close relationship between clothing and art reaches its peak here. It is the best achievement of him. Fashion becomes a means of expression that makes us slightly forget the functionality of the piece”.

together with his partner Pablo Mesejean, formed the first artistic adventure as a duo in Argentine art. They traveled to New York and then to London in 1970, where their work was published in magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. They created Pablo & Delia, their own clothing brand that is part of the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. After living in Paris in 1967 thanks to a scholarship granted by the French government, they joined Experiencias 68 (where they created a fashion magazine without text) and carried out the Ropa con Riesgo show at the Di Tella Institute. Together they wrote their iconic manifesto.