OFF Gallery in Cuenca: A Contemporary Art Space with No Limits

When someone starts a new job, a new venture, or a business, they want to make a difference. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, because everything depends on a series of events that take place along the path you’re on.

Fortunately, the OFF gallery is in that first group, in which things have turned out according to the objectives set: to be a contemporary art space in Cuenca where artists feel comfortable and have no limits.

The precursor of this idea was Boris Ordóñez, an artist who, for more than five years, had carried a slogan on him: that Cuenca needed an art gallery, a space where painters, sculptors, photographers had the opportunity to show their work. .

And then, after gaining experience in a tiny gallery, in which he understood local and foreign audiences, he dared to consider why not start with his own gallery, a different gallery.

It was when Boris restructured a building that is next to Avenida 10 de Agosto and Federico Proaño street. As a result: a place divided into three spacious floors, with a view towards the historic center of Cuenca.

Then came the curatorship of Hernán Pacurucu, who today is the new director of the Cuenca Biennial Foundation. Between Pacurucu and Ordóñez, when the pandemic was still a problem, they put together a first exhibition called “King of the kings”.

The sample, which was collective, brought together 51 artists from all over Ecuador, who on April 6, 2022 inaugurated the OFF gallery.

New projects

A year later, Boris Ordóñez does a retrospective of the gallery, which has not only organized exhibitions in its spaces. Another of the commitments that both Boris and Hernán made was to get the artists out of the gallery, take them to other spaces in Ecuador and outside of it.

“We start from the gallery, and that is the question that many do not understand everything that the gallery does. We move nationally and internationally. We are taking artists to other cities, supporting them to do their exhibitions, we are taking them out of the country”, commented Ordóñez.

Under the premise that the gallery is the starting point, after almost 13 months of uninterrupted operation, new projects and new exhibitions are coming.

“We have big projects. We have a show in Poland, in September. We are going to do a pictorial production residency. We are also generating productions, through the artists that adapt to our content,” Pacurucu told the newspaper El Mercurio.

To this is added, on the one hand, a publishing label, whose first book will be about the sculptor Antonio Cauja; on the other hand there will be a series of exhibitions in the gallery already planned until March 2024.

Among the samples that are listed, “The Queen of Queens” stands out, an exhibition of women artists. It is expected that between 20 and 30 artists from Ecuador will exhibit their works from August 26 in the gallery.

This cultural fact will mark a space that began as an idea and became a place in Cuenca for the world. (YO)