LAURA MARQUEZ'S DRAWINGS AT ARTÍSTICA

Prominent art critics recognized the artist as a relentless innovator. The influential critic Marta Traba in her publication "Arte Latinoamericano Actual" (1972) says about her works that "they have the characteristics of a desperate pioneering; and it is fair to give her the merit of a battering ram".

Like many artists, during the Stronist dictatorship, the lack of financial resources, the absence of a significant art market and a repressive climate, Laura Márquez was forced to emigrate.

However, during some of her extended periods in the country –between 1960 and 1970– Márquez produced significant works, which are the ones that are part of the exhibition at Artística.

The curatorial text written by Carlos Sosa Rabito explains: "Ejercitario makes public a significant group of drawings –some of them in color– made by Laura Márquez during her initial training in Rio de la Plata art institutions. Let's remember that the determination –perhaps obsessive but natural– of every apprentice privileges the subtlety of a beautiful representation, a notable bias in the drawings shown today. Laura systematically and personally exercises the possibilities of the two-dimensional image that every drawing supposes in the generative void of the supporting paper; mysterious territory in which the line gains identity to the extent that it consolidates its autonomous expressive vocation and makes room for the artist's sensibility, symbiotic moment of constitution of the creative act itself, of the poiesis, we would say. In general, the drawings, openly exploring the representation of the human body as the attainment of beauty, are achievements won to the craft first with tenacity and commitment, in which the energy of the conceptual creative will and a refined materiality beat ponderously".

Laura Márquez is one of the pioneers of Paraguayan modern art since the 1950s. She has lived in New York, United States, since the seventies, and now she is back to work in our country.

She was born in 1929 in Asuncion, Paraguay. At the age of 18 she traveled to Argentina and returned to her country with the modern knowledge she had learned and had a decisive influence on Paraguayan art. In Buenos Aires, in 1955, together with her colleagues Julio Le Parc, Horacio J. Sofons and others, she initiated the Student Movement for the Reform of the Fine Arts Schools. She was vice-president of the Student Center of Fine Arts. In 1961 she won first prize in the Mural Contest for the Guarani Hotel, Asuncion. Her project was not carried out, "for budgetary reasons" alleged by the organizer.

Some of the series she has made are "Cool Art" (of which her work "Six months of silence" is part), "Roads", "The curtains", "The Towers", "The crosses" and "The scream", based on the work of the same name by Edward Munch. In March 2005, Laura Márquez received the title of Honorary Professor of the Universidad del Norte.

Ejercitarios. Individual exhibition by Laura Márquez.

Curated by Carlos Sosa Rabito.

Artística Espacio de Arte. Denis Roa, Asunción, Paraguay.