THE IMAGE OF ANOTHER WORLD TAKES SHAPE IN A VIBRANT FORM: FIVE PERUVIAN ARTISTS AT PINTA LIMA 2026

The body stands as a transversal axis. The decorative, the feminine, and the popular emerge as fundamental tools for mapping the present. The image of another world takes shape in a vibrant form. This April Pinta Lima 2026 presents, alongside curators Florencia Portocarrero and Irene Gelfman, a Special Project that exposes the contemporary Peruvian art scene through the work of five young artists: Elizabeth Vásquez, Fátima Rodrigo, Pierina Másquez, Verovcha, and Yone Makino.

The gallery was transformed into a habitable space that visitors must traverse in its entirety to fully grasp what is on display. The works, though diverse and produced individually, develop within the exhibition a mutual dependence: they form a map of what is happening in contemporary Peru. The gallery is an active body, the viewer is an active body, the work is an active body.

The hybrid is absolutely necessary to locate a shared terrain. "Rather than presenting a homogeneous panorama, the exhibition articulates a set of practices that, across a diversity of media, share a common sensibility in which materiality occupies a central place," Portocarrero explained in conversation with Arte al Día.

The selection brings together five artists born after the 1980s, with international reach and actively working within the local scene, who have been redefining the languages and concerns of contemporary art in Lima. In Gelfman's words: "the work of these five artists, with very different approaches, questions the notion of art and craft, rethinks the value and place of Peruvian art, and challenges certain terminologies carried over from modernism onward — the place Latin American art has occupied as something always lesser, always derivative."

The interdisciplinary nature of their practices — none of them confined to a single medium — allows matter itself to be activated as a field of thought. The works cease to be autonomous objects and become spaces for dialogue.

Pierina Másquez Limo (Chiclayo, 1993) works across textile, ceramics, drawing, and painting to address the relationships between body, desire, and collective organization, from an experience shaped by internal migration, workers' memory, and domestic labor. Fátima Rodrigo (Lima, 1987) works with installation, sculpture, textile, sound, and scenography. Her practice investigates how European modernism was appropriated and resignified within Latin American popular culture. Verovcha (Lima, 1994) explores the body as a porous vehicle that destabilizes the illusion of separation, positioning itself between form and overflow. Her work weaves together painting, textile, embroidery, and ritual actions from a sensibility close to tantric geometry. Yone Makino (Lima, 1997) builds from research and interpretation of memory, identity, the passage of time, and the Japanese diaspora. In her painting she explores materiality through intuition and gesture, generating fictional narratives about the everyday, the nostalgia of remembering, and questions of identity. Elizabeth Vásquez Arbulú (Lima, 1990) develops an interdisciplinary artistic practice grounded in the investigation of territory, culture, and their social and environmental transformations. Her work draws on video, ceramics, sculpture, and site-specific installation.

At Pinta Lima 2026's Special Project, visitors will encounter what Gelfman calls "a fundamental genealogy for tracing what is happening in contemporary Peruvian art." For Portocarrero, "the body — as a surface of affective and political inscription — becomes a fundamental key for understanding the density of these practices." The Image of The image of another world takes shape in a vibrant form is there to be walked through.