Fernando Bryce
Drawing modern history
29 June–20 August 2012
Opening: 29 June, 7pm
Malba – Fundación Costantini
Avda. Figueroa Alcorta 3415
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Hours: Thu–Mon, 12–8pm / Wed 12–9pm
T 54 11 4808 6500
info [at] malba.org.ar / prensa [at] malba.org.ar
www.malba.org.ar
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Curators: Natalia Majluf and Tatiana Cuevas
Malba – Fundación Costantini is pleased to announce Fernando Bryce: Drawing Modern History. Organized by the Museo de Arte de Lima – MALI with the support of Prom Perú, this mid-career survey presents 19 ambitious series consisting of more than 1000 elements produced between 1997 and 2011 and drawn from public and private collections in North America and Europe.
Over the past decade Fernando Bryce (b. 1965, Lima) has produced an incisive body of work based on historical memory and modes of representation. Bryce’s series focus on crucial historical episodes which he explores critically and systematically. His method, which he has described as “mimetic analysis,” relies on the careful copying of pamphlets, official documents, press images, political propaganda, and advertisements in order to articulate large suites of ink drawings that deal with power relations and their mediatization in twentieth-century history. Through the basic play of re-presentation (in the most literal sense of showing again), by copying or by the simple mise en scène of documents and objects, Bryce uses appropriation, parody, and irony as weapons to expose and question the prejudices underlying commonly accepted official discourses. Through this strategy, Bryce literally recovers the figuration of ideology. His project thus engages the images of history in the modern world, fixed selectively to forge a genealogy of the present.
Fernando Bryce: Drawing Modern History traces the way in which the artist’s project gradually expands to acquire a programmatic character and an almost encyclopedic ambition. At the turn of the millennium, his work opened up to take on other regions and other chapters of twentieth-century history, from the revolutionary cycle and the Cold War in Latin America to the Spanish Civil War, different episodes of European colonialism, and the Second World War. In these works, the juxtaposition of images of diverse origin creates dense and powerful narrative groupings.
For the exhibition at Malba, Fernando Bryce: Drawing Modern History will be accompanied by a major catalogue in Spanish and English, featuring the critical essay “Seeing History” by Natalia Maljuf, Director of MALI and curator of the exhibition, and an interview with the artist by the critic Carlo Trivelli, as well as installation views of the works in the show.
On the occasion of this survey exhibition, his first in Argentina, the artist will donate the work The World Over 1929 (2010) to the permanent collection of Malba.