The Autonomous Community of Madrid’s CA2M presents Spain’s first retrospective exhibition by Cecilia Vicuña

February 19, 2021. - The Autonomous Community of Madrid’s CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo opens the Cecilia Vicuña exhibition. Veroír el Fracaso, jointly presented by Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art) in Rotterdam and CA2M, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo. This is the Chilean artist’s first retrospective in our country, which can be visited between February 20 and July 11, 2021. The exhibition also features the support of the Chilean Government’s Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage.

The presentation was attended today by Marta Rivera de la Cruz, Councillor for Culture and Tourism, accompanied by Rolando Ortega Klose, Minister-Counsellor of the Chilean Embassy in Spain. In the words of Rivera de la Cruz, "it is a real honour to present this exhibition by Cecilia Vicuña, a true reference of Latin American art on the international scene and one of the greatest representatives of performance art".

Since the 1960s, Cecilia Vicuña has been proposing a radical perspective on the relationship between art and politics through her writing and artistic production all over the globe, from the time she left Chile, her native country, for London in 1972, later establishing herself in the United States from 1980 onwards.

She has spent decades developing a varied and multidisciplinary body of work built from words, images, environments and a combination of languages, mediums and techniques.

The exhibition, curated by the Peruvian Miguel A. López, brings together more than one hundred pieces, never before seen in Spain, that reflect her ongoing commitment to themes that include eroticism, colonial legacies, struggles for liberation, collective happiness, indigenous thought and environmental devastation.

TRAJECTORY

The 1973 coup d'état in Chile shaped the emotional structure of Cecilia Vicuña (Santiago de Chile, 1948) during her formative years, as well as that of the entire nation. Her work is linked to political resistance, feminist and sociological methodologies, while dialogues with indigenous culture and ecological justice permeate her practice.

Vicuña began painting in the mid-sixties. She was influenced by Andean and mestizo painting that was produced in the Cuzco School around the 16th and 17th centuries, and appropriated iconographic elements of European art to preserve Andean beliefs. Also significant was her meeting with the painter Leonora Carrington in Mexico in 1969. Drawing on these influences, Vicuña's paintings included nude women protesting in the streets, references to animism, Andean philosophy, folklore, and popular myths, as well as depictions of important leftist figures and feminist and civil rights activists.

In September 1967, Vicuña wrote the No-manifesto. This document gave birth to Tribu No (No Tribe), a collective of young poets and artists in Santiago who, like Vicuña, sought to visualise their opposition to the country's conservative forces. The improvised actions of Tribu No were influenced by self-reflexive experiments in the poetry field.

In another collective effort, in 1974, after the military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, Cecilia Vicuña, David Medalla, John Dugger and Guy Brett founded Artists for Democracy in London. This group mobilised international artists and intellectuals, who responded to their call to donate and create works in support of Chile's struggle to restore democracy. Their contributions ranged from the mass demonstration in Trafalgar Square to collages and paintings calling for a reversal of imperialism and the colonial order.

In 1977, Vicuña presented Homage to Vietnam in Bogotá, an exhibition celebrating the victory of the Vietnamese people. Her paintings emphasised the beauty of the recovered relationship between bodies and the natural world in a reunified Vietnam. Some of the pieces were painted as banners made of silk, cotton and strips of cloth, hung on bamboo poles. Vicuña's intention was that the wind should blow through the pieces as the battle blows through the air.

Between 1973 and 1980, Vicuña produced a series of drawings, collages, videos, and performances that examine the role of poetry in a climate of political repression and forced disappearances in South America, and the role of imperial violence around the world. Produced mostly between London and Bogotá, 

Palabrarmas proposes unresolved paradoxes between art and revolutionary politics. Through the representation of words as weapons, the series advocates the transformative dimension of language in the fight against dictatorships.

CECILIA VICUÑA

She is a visual artist and writer; considered to be one of the pioneers of conceptual art in Chile. Her practice focuses on performance, painting, sculpture and video. She studied at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Chile and later pursued postgraduate studies at the University College Slade School of Fine Arts. She founded the group of artists and poets Tribu No (No Tribe), and co-founded Artists for Democracy in London, an artists' organisation dedicated to creating solidarity projects with what was then referred to as the Third World.

In 1975 she moved to Colombia, where she continued to study popular indigenous art and collaborated with the Colombian Theatre Corporation. She was an Art History lecturer at the University of Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano and of Contemporary Latin American Poetry at the Universidad Libre de Bogotá El Arte. She was part of the Heresies Collective, which published the Heresies magazine: A Feminist Publication of Arts and Politics.

Her pieces feature in the collections of museums such as the Tate Modern (London), the Chile Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC), the Lima Art Museum (MALI) and Santiago de Chile National Fine Arts Museum (MNBA). Her most recent collective exhibitions include Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960-1985, presented at the Hammer Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. In 2017, her work was part of Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece, and in Kassel, Germany. She currently lives and works between New York and Santiago de Chile.

Cecilia Vicuña won the 2019 Velázquez Visual Arts Prize, awarded in Spain by the Ministry of Culture and Sports, for her "outstanding work" and her "multidimensional art". According to the jury, Vicuña "displays a multidimensional art in which she interacts with the earth, written language and fabrics". She is, the jury adds, "the creator of a special poetics in which ecological awareness, the city and the art institution intersect". Her work is "indebted" to "a millenary knowledge updated through performances, installations, sculptures, books and gestures of everyday life".