Cecilia Vicuña, the precocious artist who triumphed at the age of 74 | Ideas

The sea taught Cecilia Vicuña a lesson in the summer time of 1966. The then Chilean teenager, who grew up among forests and publications, devoid of footwear or limitations, experienced tuned her senses to the language of nature. The waves of the Pacific, on the coastline of Concón, wrested from him “in a second” the idea that the earth was a defenseless spot. “It was a moment of revelation where by I recognized that almost everything felt the exact way I did,” she remembers her 74 many years outdated. With her feet in the sand, she took a stick, buried it and gave it as an providing, understanding the tide would make it go away: “I planted it to say ‘I get it.’ This is how precarious art was born ”.

The awareness that the smallest intervention is section of the dance of the cosmos has formed Vicuña’s function for fifty percent a century. A perform marked by his devotion to character. “What is my artwork? A recognition of that duty, of that absolute adore for what exists and that you have to just take care of it ”, he explains in a telephone dialogue.

That stick was swept away by the sea, but other “basuritas” – sculptures established with waste -, as very well as oil paintings, textiles, films and reveals They are component of Vicuña’s solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the metropolis in which he lived for 4 many years. “He has created the reverse journey of modern-day artwork, which goes from figurative to abstract. Not because of the pose, but for the reason that his argument is incredibly immaculate ”, underlines the art historian José de Nordenflycht, a good connoisseur of the artist’s multidimensional do the job. “The wonderful collectors of him are Asian. There is a closeness to Buddhism. What is rubbish? The probability that a material physique alterations and activities its reincarnation ”, provides the professor of the University of Playa Ancha.

Vicuña broke the rules of Western art on that beach when she was only 16. At first, Chilean critics labeled her paintings of her as naive, most of her friends dismissed her function, and right up until a short while ago she considered she would die as an invisible artist. On the other hand, her visual poetry, impressed by feminism, the natural environment, indigenism and racism, has captured the awareness of present day curators and a new era of viewers who share the groundbreaking language of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. at the last Venice Biennale. .

The jolt of consideration, simultaneous and potential exhibitions do not litter the artist’s head. The accounts of his memories of him are so vivid and visual that you can hear the pages of the e-book turn in which he initial noticed a photograph of a quipu, knotted ropes that Andean cultures employed to record data. An instance of the significance of that instant is that the Tate of London, exactly where she will exhibit from October, acquired the Womb of Quipu: 50 threads of red wool hanging from a steel ring and symbolizing menstruation.

In the memory of his previous, always told with a sweet and slow voice, like a person who tells a tale to a kid right before likely to snooze, a single can scent the contemporary paint of the Allende mural that he has colored together with a team of schoolmates. class out of her substantial university in 1964 and also viewing her expression of astonishment when at the age of 10 a classmate advised him that her wish to end land abuse was socialism. I had never heard that phrase. When she got home she questioned her father, a non-militant Allendist, what it meant. After listening to the clarification, she replied: “So I’m a socialist.”

Politics and activism shaped his vocation. The revolutions of the 1960s in Cuba, Brazil and Chile fueled their starvation for justice and generation. Until September 11, 1973, even though she was learning in London on a scholarship, a fellow college student from her home knocked on her door in the middle of the night to inform her of Pinochet’s coup. “The entire world has collapsed on me”, she remembers her via tears. That night time, awake, she painted The demise of Salvador Allende: A red race – the shot – drips the socialist’s blood in the center of a desert of corpses. The perform, which has hardly ever been exhibited in Chile, is portion of the retrospective of his function called See fault illuminatedwhich closes tomorrow in Bogotá, just after passing by way of Holland, Mexico and Spain.

She under no circumstances lived in Chile again. It also marked the conclude of her profession as a painter. De Nordenflycht argues that Vicuña breaks down the divisions of artwork. “You can use any medium of expression to set up your poem. It moves from the verb to the impression and from the impression to the verb. The foundation is what issues, how it is formed becomes secondary ”, underlines the secretary of the not long ago established Fundación Precario, dedicated to heritage conservation which explains the sources of the artist’s theoretical imagined.

His initially solo demonstrate, in 1971, was an justification for death. In Fall, Vicuña filled just one of the rooms of the Santiago Museum of Fantastic Arts with dry leaves. In that very same exhibition he wrote that getting aware of demise compelled the human staying to be a revolutionary. As a child I employed to enjoy in the woods I beloved the arrival of autumn. “I viewed vigilantly that the most attractive of the seasons was the dying of the tree, which enters as if into a condition of snooze, of torpor for the duration of the winter season.” There she turned conscious of demise. And that’s in which his revolution started.

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