GATO: THE GALLERY THAT SEEKS TO GENERATE NEW DIALOGUES IN PERU

With an eye on the international stage, GATO is committed to introducing innovative creative practices and fresh curatorial perspectives, exhibiting artists for the first time in South America while also crafting dialogues with Peru’s own expansive art scene and rich history.

The showcase for GATO’s mission will be its newly renovated 140 square meter exhibition space, housed in a historical, Republican style building dating back to 1895. Overlooking the Plaza Bolognesi, one of the bustling centers of the city, GATO underscores Lima’s rich architectural legacies, from its original Haussmann modeled urbanization to its current state of regrowth and renewal. While acknowledging this storied past, the space looks squarely ahead to the future, embracing and championing new possibilities and intersections that are afforded by Peru’s unrivaled position as one of the cultural capitals of the Americas.

GATO inaugurated its programming with the group exhibition, Formas Aparte. The show brings together a notable array of international artists exhibiting in Peru for the first time. Thematically, the project elaborates on a basic tenet of architectural theory: any built structure is defined as much by its material attributes (foundation, armature, walls etc.) as by the negative or empty spaces these demarcate, encompass or surround. In fact, these voids are integral to complex engineering systems where they serve a myriad of structural purposes. The unseen labor of these negative spaces can also take on a symbolic nature, memorializing the personal histories that can be covered up or built over, an inevitable outcome of ‘progress’ mapped when onto a linear axis.

The works in the exhibition exists precisely at this intersection, foregrounding the many micro-dramas that animate our daily interactions with seemingly impersonal architectures. Here, built structures are re-cast and made highly personal: mapped with situated bodies, viewed from idiosyncratic perspectives, rendered intimate by the touch of the artist’s hand. Many of the pieces on view use common building materials or nod to traditional building techniques or practices, bringing together fragments or debris that speak to a larger whole. In this way, the idea of ‘site surveying’ is expanded to include the artist’s understanding of place, specifically the city of Lima itself, which informs this dialogue as a living entity in constant and poetic flux.