SEARCHING FOR A REPUBLIC: PERU'S PAST AND PRESENT ON A CHESS BOARD
Gonzalo García Callegari presents his twentieth solo exhibition at the Inca Garcilaso Cultural Center in Lima. In the wake of Peru’s bicentennial of independence, he invites us—with his signature dark humor—to question the unfinished ideals of national emancipation.
The Inca Garcilaso Cultural Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs hosts A Republic is Wanted, the new solo exhibition by Peruvian visual artist Gonzalo García Callegari. Through the artist’s imagination and a visual language rich in sarcasm and irony, the exhibition delves into Peru’s history, identity, memory, and politics, and the persistent failure to realize the ideals that once fueled the struggle for independence.
This marks the artist’s twentieth solo show and represents a new milestone in the development of his acclaimed series Peruanismos, initiated in 2009 and revisited in 2014, 2016, and 2021. On this occasion, García Callegari brings together key pieces from each of these stages with new, previously unseen works, weaving a critical narrative around the republican promise in Peru and its historical contradictions.
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Gonzalo García Callegari: Se busca una república, en el Centro Cultural Inca Garcilaso
Through drawing, painting, collage, and the use and reinterpretation of external images and materials—such as maps, photographs, posters, and works by other artists—the artist constructs a unique universe where national symbols are interrogated, political leaders are caricatured, and history becomes a chessboard where Incas and viceroys still face off.
“In short, García Callegari’s paintings take the pulse of our premodern republic and warn us that in the ‘imagined community’ of our nation, there are no real boundaries between the historical past and the present. Transformation will only come as a sudden flash of inner clarity within our own collective consciousness,” says historian Ramón Mujica Pinilla, author of the curatorial text.
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Gonzalo García Callegari: Se busca una república, en el Centro Cultural Inca Garcilaso
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Gonzalo García Callegari: Se busca una república, en el Centro Cultural Inca Garcilaso
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Gonzalo García Callegari: Se busca una república, en el Centro Cultural Inca Garcilaso
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Gonzalo García Callegari: Se busca una república, en el Centro Cultural Inca Garcilaso
A Republic is Wanted is not just the artist’s most recent project; through graphic devices such as caricature and comic art, it offers a biting x-ray of our national fictions and proposes a visual reflection on what we are, what we were, and what we still fail to become.
Gonzalo García Callegari (Lima, 1971) lives and works between Madrid and Lima. He studied painting at the Faculty of Art at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, and has also pursued studies in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. Since 2019, he has led and promoted the artistic collective Fixed Project Lima. In 2024, he participated in the second edition of the Latin American Artists Accelerator Program (PAAL), organized by BOOM Art Community in Madrid. He has held around twenty solo exhibitions in Peru and Spain at various galleries and cultural centers, participated in numerous residencies, and received several awards in both countries. His work has been shown in many group exhibitions and fairs across Peru, Spain, Portugal, the United States, Uruguay, and Macedonia. It is held in both private and public collections in Peru and abroad.
His upcoming projects will explore themes such as the aesthetics of 1950s North American femininity (to be exhibited in Madrid in the second half of 2025), the concept of the museum space and its evolution over time, and a new series titled Contemporary Classics, in which he explores the aesthetics of classical Greece fused with Peruvian elements from both past and present.
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