LA CHOLA POBLETE IN MILÁN – THE EXHIBITION “GUAYMALLÉN” ARRIVES AT MUDEC
MUDEC in Milan presented the exhibition Guaymallén, by Argentinian artist La Chola Poblete, winner in 2023 of the prestigious international “Artist of the Year” award dedicated by the Deutsche Bank to contemporary art, and who was recently celebrated with a special mention for her contribution to the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. The exhibition is curated by Britta Färber, Global Head of Art & Culture at the Bank.
After opening at PalaisPopulaire in Berlin, the “Artist of the Year” exhibition travels to MUDEC in Milan. Instead of awarding a cash prize, Deutsche Bank supports its Artists of the Year by making them known to the general public, preparing solo exhibitions and catalogues, and acquiring some of their works for the Deutsche Bank Collection, which was established in 1980 and is now one of the most important corporate collections worldwide. The choice has been to traditionally open the “Artist of the Year” solo exhibition at PalaisPopulaire, Deutsche Bank's space in Berlin dedicate to art and culture, and then to display it in other international institutions.
With the Guaymallén project, La Chola Poblete pays homage to her indigenous origins and queer identity. The exhibition, which takes its name from her hometown in northern Argentina, Mendoza, at the foothills of the Andes, combines the artist's life, roots, experience and vision into a deeply personal and forthright narrative, rich in beauty, cruelty and rebellion.
For Guaymallén, the artist designed a space that recalls the Andean Baroque architectural style, redefining Mudec Photo's spaces as an extraordinary contemporary “church of design”, a place populated by religious, political, erotic, pop-cultural and indigenous motifs and symbols overlapping each other, thus creating an immersive environment where stories of salvation, virgins, martyrs and ancient goddesses are filtered through the lenses of self-emancipation, healing and subversive claims.
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La Chola Poblete, 2023 Foto: Tomas Wurschmidt / © La Chola Poblete
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La Chola Poblete: Barroco Andino, 2023 Watercolor on paper, 200 x 152 cm © La Chola Poblete
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La Chola Poblete: Sin título, 2023 Watercolor, acrylic, ink, and Colors on paper, 65 x 50 cm © La Chola Poblete
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La Chola Poblete: Virgen de la Carrodilla, 2023 Watercolor, acrylic, and ink colors on paper, 200 x 152 cm © La Chola Poblete
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La Chola Poblete: Virgen del Carmen de Cuyo, 2023 Watercolor, acrylic, and ink colors on paper, 200 x 152 cm © La Chola Poblete
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La Chola Poblete: Virgen de la leche, 2023 Photograph, 152 x 160 cm © La Chola Poblete
In particular, the exhibition presents a series of new works created with the use of a very special technique, which involves baking sculptures made with bread dough, a material that has a life of its own and is transformed into something new, beyond the artist's control.
This peculiarity led to the collaboration with Panificio Davide Longoni for the Italian stage of Guaymallén, a historic Milanese bakery where La Chola baked some life size anthropomorphic sculptures, thus establishing a parallelism between the ritual of bread-making and that of artistic creation.
In addition to a series of large-scale watercolours, the exhibition will also present a new series of three photographic works where La Chola interprets the main character, drawing inspiration from mythological figures such as the Capitoline she-wolf in the work La Loba (The She-Wolf), as well as from Christian iconography in La Virgen de la leche (Madonna Lactans), where the artist feeds with her milk into the mouth of Mormon - a religious group - thus making a clear reference to the exploitation brought about by colonialism. The third work, printed on a T-shirt, shows an extreme situation involving La Chola herself being skinned.
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