Terapia

Curators: Gabriela Rangel, Verónica Rossi, and Santiago Villanueva

Malba (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires) presents the groundbreaking exhibition Terapia (Therapy), which explores the pervasive influence of Freudian psychoanalysis on Argentine culture at large and its inception as a vector for modernity. The curatorial approach of this exhibition is grounded in the development of the field of therapeutic practice and knowledge in the past century—which in time has become idiosyncratic to the national identity.

Terapia gathers 200 works by modern and contemporary artists who dealt with different topics informed by the reception of psychoanalysis in Argentina as well as its critical counterpoints and ruptures.

Rather than presenting a historiography of psychoanalysis, the exhibition posits a number of questions which aim to become an invitation to reflect, from the perspective of the visual arts, on the conditions that made the psychoanalytic drive one of the most singular and remarkable features of modern Argentine culture.

According to Malba Artistic Director Gabriela Rangel: “Without claiming to be exhaustive, nor go through the vast set of relationships between practices and theorizations about the unconscious which have permeated the local visual arts—Freudian ideas that attracted thinkers, critics and artists—with this exhibition we aim to map Argentine art from the perspective of psycho-therapy and its promise of secular progress through treatment and mental cure. The exhibition draws upon formulations on the unconscious, which appeared with surrealism, dissenting manifestations, and radical performative expressions from the 1960s and 1970s, in a non-chronological, non-linear way.”

The exhibition brings together works by over 50 Argentine and exiled artists such as Arte de los Medios (E. Costa, R. Jacoby and R. Escarri), Roberto Aizenberg, Pompeyo Audivert, Líbero Badíi, Mildred Burton, Aída Carballo, Gertrudis Chale, Sara Facio, Manuel Aja Espil, Jacobo Fijman, Nicolás Guagnini, Emilia Gutiérrez, Narcisa Hirsch, Margarita Paksa, Martha Peluffo, Juan Batlle Planas, Lea Lublin, Oscar Masotta, Luis Felipe Noé, Emilio Renart, Claudia del Río, Susana Rodríguez, Marisa Rubio, Grete Stern, Ideal Sánchez, and Marcia Schvartz, among others. There is also a vast selection of documentary material that sheds light on the development of psychoanalysis in Argentina and its relationship to art and culture.

Works on the exhibition belong to private collections and leading institutions such as: Museo Sívori, Fundación Klemm, Archivo Di Tella, Fundación Espigas, IDA, Fundación Larivière, Fundación BBVA, CeDInCI, and APA, among others. Terapia is accompanied with a magazine focused on conversation as therapy with contributions by Vicente Zitto Lema and Enrique Pichon-Rivière, Marta Peluffo, Marisa Rubio, Nicolas Guagnini and David Joselit. Malba will also produce a fully illustrated bilingual catalogue with essays by Mariano Plotkin, Gabriela Rangel, Veronica Rossi, Santiago Villanueva, and artists Claudia del Río and Marisa Rubio.