Recovering Beauty:
The 1990s in Buenos Aires
Through May 22, 2011
Blanton Museum of Art
MLK & Congress
Austin, TX 78701
www.blantonmuseum.org
The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin presents Recovering Beauty: The 1990s in Buenos Aires through May 22, 2011. Organized by The Blanton, the exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of art produced in Buenos Aires during the 1990s, a time of pivotal transformation in Argentina. Recovering Beauty focuses on the work of a group of artists who exhibited at the Rojas Gallery during the 1990s, which rose to prominence during this decade. Through their work, this group of artists hoped to move beyond the oppressive climate of the military dictatorship of the previous decades to build a new appreciation of visual culture as a source of pleasure and joy. The Blanton’s associate curator of Latin American Art, Ursula Davila-Villa states: “The exhibition’s purpose is twofold: to display the artists’ shared desire to celebrate life through art, and to demonstrate the crucial role the Rojas Gallery, and its artistic community, played in transforming visual art in Buenos Aires during the 1990s.”
Panel Discussion: Recovering History
Thursday, April 28, 5PM
Recovering History brings together a group of artists, curators, and art historians—Coco Fusco, Salah Hassan, Lawrence Rinder, Osvaldo Sanchez, Elisabeth Sussman, and Roberto Tejada—to discuss the continuing impact of exhibitions from the 1990s. That decade saw a proliferation of biennials, a growing number of exhibitions of contemporary art from around the world, and the first exhibitions to put social practice on view. Politics, identity and otherwise, were at the forefront of the national conversation in the U.S. and these and other issues were reflected in the exhibitions of the decade.
Funding for this program is provided by the Barbara Duncan Centennial Endowed Lectureship and by the Carolyn Harris Hynson Centennial Visiting Professorship in Fine Arts
Artists included:
Fabián Burgos, Feliciano Centurión, Beto de Volder, Sebastián Gordín, Jorge Gumier Maier, Miguel Harte, Graciela Hasper, Fabio Kacero, Benito Laren, Alfredo Londaibere, Marcelo Pombo, Cristina Schiavi, and Omar Schiliro.
Blanton Museum of Art
The Blanton Museum of Art is widely recognized as a leader in the field of Latin American art. Since 2004, The Blanton has collected and exhibited works by a number of artists included in the exhibition, and was the first U.S. museum to acquire, present, and discuss the work of this group as part of the museum’s continuing commitment to strengthening its holdings of Argentinean modern and contemporary art. Additionally, Recovering Beauty builds upon the museum’s history of innovative and scholarly exhibitions in this field—over 100 exhibitions of Latin American art to date—including Cantos Paralelos: Visual Parody in Contemporary Argentinean Art, Jorge Macchi: The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, and the museum’s America/Americas permanent collection installation.
Recovering Beauty: The 1990s in Buenos Aires is organized by Ursula Davila-Villa, associate curator of Latin American Art for the Blanton Museum of Art. Support for the exhibition is provided by Judy and Charles Tate, the Susan Vaughan Foundation, and by a grant from Houston Endowment Inc. in honor of Melissa Jones for the presentation of contemporary art at The Blanton. The accompanying catalog is made possible by Michael Chesser.
*Image above:
Blanton Museum of Art, Gift of the Artist, 2007.
