Jorge Macchi: Perspective

MALBA presents Perspective the first anthological exhibition of work by Jorge Macchi (Buenos Aires, 1963) ever held in Argentina. The show, which encompasses 25 years of production (1990 to the present), includes nearly 60 works in an array of formats (works on paper, videos, paintings, photographs, and installations) from private and public collections in Argentina, Spain, Portugal, and the United States. Jorge Macchi Perspective is organized by MALBA in collaboration with Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, the show is organized around different thematic clusters that encompass the artist’s cartographies; works made from newspaper clippings; installations where time stands still and optical effects shatter reality; pictorial phantasmagorias; and video installations in which music plays a key role. The title of the exhibition Perspective—chosen to replace the word “retrospective”—suggests a present vision of the artist’s past experiences. On a formal level, the word makes reference to the reproduction of form and how objects are manifested before our eyes. The term is related to a constant in Macchi’s work: the tendency of the real to come apart and the fictional nature of the signs that people the world.

Many of the works in the exhibition were produced especially for it or, though featured previously at major biennials, art fairs, and shows around the world, have never before been exhibited in the country. This is the case of the installation Buenos Aires Tour, which opens the MALBA show and was included in the Istanbul Biennial in 2003; Caja de música (Music Box) presented at the San Pablo Biennial in 2004; Still Song produced for the international pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2005; and El cuarto de las cantantes (The Singers’ Room), an installation co-authored with Edgardo Rudnitsky based on Idea Vilariño’s poem “Adiós” originally exhibited at the University of Essex in England in 2006 and presented at MALBA in Spanish for the first time. Similarly, the video installation XYZ was produced in 2012 for the Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zürich and From here to Eternity for the Museum of Art, Lucerne, Switzerland, in 2013.

Perspectiva goes beyond the confines of MALBA with two major installations. Refracción (Refraction), 2012, will be exhibited at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella’s Art Gallery from April 8 to June 3, 2016. That work addresses a central component of Macchi’s poetics: the surprising irruption of the unthinkable in reality. The second is La noche de los museos (The Night of the Museums), 2016, a site-specific work for the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA) that will be on exhibit from April 15 to July 31, 2016. 

Jorge Macchi is represented by Alexander and Bonin (New York), Galleria Continua (San Geminiano, Beijing, Les Moulins, La Habana), Galeria Luisa Strina (São Paulo), Galerie Peter Kilchmann (Zürich), and Ruth Bencazar Galería de Arte (Buenos Aires).

Also on view at MALBA:
Marcados by Brazilian artist Claudia Andujar (Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 1931), is an exhibition featuring a series of over 80 black-and-white photographs. These images are a celebration of the rich Yanomami culture and a way into the complexities of its world. In the 80s, Andujar spent long periods with the Yanomami tribe in the basin of the Catrimani River in the state of Roraima, Brazil. As part of the health campaigns carried out at that time to help the indigenous population, Andujar took many photographs of the environment and its inhabitants. Along with the team of doctors, she identified each individual photographed with a number hanging around his or her neck that was used as an image in immunization records. 

Cameo is a project designed specifically for MALBA in which artist Juan Tessi (Lima, Peru, 1972) investigates the relationship that painting establishes with performance in the framework of systems for the regulation and distribution of images.

Both exhibitions, Claudia Andujar. Marcados and Juan Tessi. Cameo will be on view at MALBA until June, 27, 2016.