Two Argentine artists have just joined fundamental collections of international contemporary art. Some 25 drawings by Fernanda Laguna, made between 2017 and 2020, were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) and the iconic artwork The Class, 1st year, 6th division, from the Buena Memoria seriesby photographer Marcelo Brodsky, is already part of the Reina Sofía collection Madrid, by a donation from the artist.
Laguna’s work is a series of small-format drawings that translate scenes from the artist’s daily life, filtered by her imagination and acted by a heart with hair that functions as the artist’s avatar. The set had been exhibited before in the sample the path of the heartLaguna’s solo show at The Drawing Center, New York in early 2022.
The drawings are made in pencil in the small space of a notebook sheet. Moleskine, 14 by 9 cm. They fit in the palm of one hand. “The little heart that appears in all the drawings with two tails and little bows is me, it is my avatar – Laguna explains to La NACION – and in each little drawing there is a story that tells something about my life: me drinking mate, or other characters appear like a bear that is my partner Andrés, the strawberry is (the curator) Santi Villanueva, many little hearts that are other girls This is how I tell things that are not very important, but small moments, like sitting looking out a window or painting a wall. That’s what this series is about.”
fernanda laguna is the owner of a multifaceted artistic practice, which focuses on visual art, but includes poetry and novels, the creation of alternative spaces for exhibition and meeting (now there are two, Para vos… Norma mía and El Universo) and the social practice through art that has been carried out in the Villa Fiorito neighborhood for almost twenty years.
“She is one of the most influential artists of her generation,” says nora fish, his gallerist. His influence can be seen in young people, in that aesthetic of fragility and a certain precariousness of the material and formal, with a lot of emotionality, which he inaugurated with Beauty and Happiness in 1999. She opened a door to the queer, the body, the precarious intercepted by pop. Although not all of his work is like that. She is an artist with her own tremendously original worldview and a multidimensional practice with many facets. In her vision there is something emotional that takes her to places in the epistemology of art and she does it from a very local and authentic place”.
What is art today? Laguna seems to ask in each of his works. The answer lies in the history of contemporary art, starting with Duchamp. “She responds from a feminist, emotional and situated place. She is very vernacular in materiality, in her concerns and the way she lives. She does everything from the heart, without speculation. She is an artist who leaves a mark, ”says Fisch.
The work of Marcelo Brodsky enters the Reina Sofía thanks to the efforts of the artist and his gallery in Buenos Aires, Rolf, together with a set of donations that reach a value of more than one million euros. These are 41 works that will join the collection thanks to the generosity of the members of the foundation that sponsors the museum, and correspond to 24 artists of different origin, many of them Latin American, such as Maxwell Alexandre (Brazil), Juan Carlos Alom (Cuba), Alfredo Jaar (Chile) and Mateo López (Colombia)).
Class belongs to the series Good memorywhich has been exhibited more than 250 times individually or collectively around the world. Brodsky holds a group portrait with his 32 classmates from the sixth division freshman at the National College of Buenos Aires to indicate what happened to their lives. “Claudio was killed in a confrontation. Martin was the first to be taken away. He did not get to know his son Pablo. Erik got fed up; he lives in Madrid. Patricia got over it but it hurt. Leonor broke free and returned to Buenos Aires recently. Etel married her school boyfriend and her children are already students again ”, Brodsky summarizes in notes that come out with colored arrows from the photo. During the 1976 dictatorship, Brodsky suffered the disappearance of his best friend, a kidnapping attempt, and the captivity and disappearance of his brother at ESMA. He went into exile in Spain, and years after his return to the country he rescued that photograph and followed the trail of his companions.
“I’m happy. It is the culmination of a process throughout my life, of rescuing the victims of school, my friends, my brother, that I started with this work in 1996. When I did it, I had no artistic intention, but to tell the students what had happened in those classrooms. Now it is permanently exposed in the main cloister of the College. Twelve years ago, at the request of Sara Facio, it was incorporated into the collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts. It is now on display at the CCK, in the Great Lamp, together with a selection from its collection in contemporary scenesBrodsky says.
The third copy was purchased by the Art Gallery of the State of São Paulo; the fourth for eThe Metropolitan Museum of New York; the fifth is kept in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; the sixth is owned by Museum of the Bank of the Republic of Colombia, where it is permanently exposed, and the last one is in the Tate Gallery de Londres. They are all unique pieces, which start from the same original, but since they are intervened by hand, the gesture is never the same. “With this seventh original plus the author’s proof, the edition of the work was exhausted,” he explains.
“The Reina Sofía is very important to me, because I was trained in Spain,” he says. On May 8, she opens an exhibition at the Contemporary Cultural Center of Barcelona, among other ongoing projects. The artist had a strong presence in Spain these days, with the solo show poetic resistance in Photo Collection, in Barcelona, and representation at the fair Arch, Madrid, hand in hand with the gallery Henrique Faria NY. There he presented the result of his residence in Angola last October.
