Leandro Katz presents his first solo exhibition in Spain
The exhibition, titled Seagull’s Footprint, surveys over four decades of continuous work, will be present at La Principal Tabacalera.
Leandro Katz’s first solo exhibition in Spain, Seagull’s Footprint, surveys over four decades of continuous work, showing eight series of projects with 60 photographic prints and 13 audiovisual pieces, including documentary and experimental films from the 70s and 80s.
His work was previously featured in some historically significant exhibitions in Spain, such as Encuentros de Pamplona (1972), and Américas at the Monastery of Santa Clara (Moguer, 1992).
Leandro Katz (1938) was born in Buenos Aires, where he currently lives, after spending more than 40 years in New York. With an original, nonchronological curatorial approach by Berta Sichel, for Bureau Phi Art, the exhibition groups pieces conceptually, displaying the artist’s connection with Latin American history, and with the cultural world of New York, the two poles of his personal and artistic universe.
His films and his photographic installations are long-term projects which deal mostly with Latin American themes: its history, anthropology, and visual arts. Prominent among them is the historical investigation Catherwood Project, 1985- 1995, a photographic reconstruction of the 19th-century archeological expeditions of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood to Mayan territories in Mexico and Central America.
His research work continues, for example, in the film Paradox, shot at the Quiriguá archeological site in Guatemala, on the former plantations of the United Fruit Company, in the documentary The Day You’ll Love Me, based on the famous photograph of Che Guevara’s corpse after his capture and execution in Bolivia in 1967, and in Exhumación, after Guevara’s clandestine grave is found by forensic anthropologists. Though Mayan culture may be the most visible and emblematic impulse behind his work, his approach to it is much more than archaeological: there are few subjects better suited to a discourse on colonialism and domination.
Cumulatively, such themes provoke more questions than ready answers. The principal tendency of this work, focused on a pre-Columbian civilization, is not to highlight the past, but rather to emphasize its current relevance – its presence still and openness to a range of personal meanings and interpretations with the spectrum of global implications, evoking parallels found throughout the contemporary world.
