"CLOSE UNIVERSES": THE ARGENTINIAN NATIONAL FUND FOR THE ARTS EXHIBITION
On Friday, March 22, the Argentinian National Fund for the Arts inaugurates Universos Cercanos (Near Universes) exhibition at the National House of the Bicentenary. Product of the Visual Arts Contest 2018, on the day of its inauguration the exhibition will announce the twenty winning artists of the competition.
Under Rosa Aiello -National Fund Director of Visual Arts - and Gonzalo Maciel curatorship, since March 22 the National House of the Bicentenary opens the exhibition Universos Cercanos (Close Universes). The exhibition is composed of 148 artworks selected by the Visual Arts Contest 2018 jury of the Argentinian National Fund for the Arts (FNA, for its initials in spanish). The works exhibited are the pre-selection that was made to nominate the twenty winning artists of the award given by the FNA. As reported by the organization, 3,000 works from almost the entire country applied to the prize.
The contest awards six prizes of $ 100,000 (approximately US $ 2,500) and fourteen other stimulus prizes of $ 30,000, all of them distributed among the three categories: Dimensional Works, Three-Dimensional Works and Photography. For the first category the jury was composed by Roberto Echen, Lara Marmor and Leila Tschopp; for the second category Carlota Beltrame, Marina De Caro and Leonel Luna; for the photography section, Alberto Goldenstein, Andrea Ostera and Guillermo Ueno. As a ceremony, the winners for each of the sections will be announced on Universos Cercanos opening.
The Visaules Arts Contest organized by the National Fund for the Arts means one of the greatest awards an Argentinean artist can receive in life within the national scene. This is because the juries are artists with a career, specialized in each of the categories and who know the state of Argentine art through their own career. Likewise, the exhibition held at the National House of the Bicentenary is a perfect synthesis of the contemporary art production of the South American country.
"This eclectic exhibition offers the possibility of contemplating the fruitful activity of our artists who, with modes of representation and execution already installed together with experimental proposals, often provide audacious works, expanding their specific fields and combining their languages with different patterns," explained Aiello, Universos Cercanos curator. "The exhibition celebrates all this boiling that speaks to us of the creative power in force in the artists of our visual scene".
On the other hand, Rosa Aiello and Gonzalo Maciel, argued that when dealing with a set of very diverse works, a curatorial axis was not something simple to do and may even seem arbitrary at times. The only thing that works as a premise is the consideration of each artwork as a microcosm of unique characteristics. Without going any further, to consider each piece as a "universe that establish synergistic ties with its environment."
