Notes related to Chile

Painting is presented here not only as an aesthetic language, but as a symbolic, intimate, and reflective tool that invites us to view the everyday from new perspectives.

What turns a place into a home? Chilean artist presents the immersive installation Bemol, which through sound and visuality builds an intimate and subjective cartography of inhabiting again a familiar environment.

The German venue exhibits the work of the challenging Chilean activist and artist, marked by exile, survival, and repression.

By Álvaro de Benito

The Lázaro Galdiano Museum in Madrid hosts the first exhibition in Spain of veteran photographer and visual artist Julia Toro (Talca, Chile, 1933). Her photographic production yields to both simplicity and wonder, frameworks that delimit and amplify the everyday themes she addresses. The protagonists of this cyclical, customary flow of life in her work are diverse, and their problems and experiences drift among the concepts of love, pain, memory, and relationship with their surroundings.

By Álvaro de Benito

The Official College of Architects of Madrid (COAM) is hosting No tan lejos (Not So Far Away), an exhibition by Emilio Pemjean (Santiago, Chile, 1971), which continues to explore his characteristic artistic approach that blends photography, design, architecture, and painting. In this exhibition, the Chilean artist presents a series of imagined and reconstructed spaces, virtually brought back to life through memory, which makes their reconstruction possible.

By Violeta Méndez

The Chilean gallery Casa Varas hosts Lincura’s provocative proposal: a new way of looking at the “exotic” —and a new way of looking into the mirror.

By Álvaro de Benito

The Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid is hosting the exhibition By Pass. La frontera del signo (By Pass. The Frontier of the Sign), a comprehensive presentation of the work of Lotty Rosenfeld (Santiago, Chile, 1943–2020), a key figure in Latin American video art whose practice emerged at the intersection of political activism and the creation of images as spaces of expression and freedom.

Chilean-born visual artist, architect and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar is this year’s recipient of the 65th Annual Edward MacDowell Medal, for his outstanding contributions to American culture in the field of “Visual Arts.” His poetic photographs, films and elaborate installations confront the greatest socio-political issues of our time, including genocide, the displacement of refugees, war, corruption and economic inequality.

MAM Chiloé opens the sixteenth edition of Vutamuseo, a cycle of exhibitions that celebrates the diversity of artistic perspectives through five proposals that intertwine color exploration, pedagogy, photography, and reflections on memory and environment.

Chile will be the guest country at this year’s PHotoESPAÑA. For the first time in its history, the international festival includes a dedicated national section, with four major figures in Chilean photography taking the spotlight. The event will feature major exhibitions of work by Lotty Rosenfeld, Julia Toro, Michael Mauney, and Martín Gusinde. These exhibitions—held across venues in Madrid and Santander—offer audiences a powerful encounter with a body of work deeply shaped by the country’s history and social fabric.

As part of the temporary exhibition Contactos. Textiles coloniales de los Andes (Contacts: Colonial Textiles from the Andes), the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art presents a mediation room for visitors, designed to bring them closer to the richness of Andean textile production and expand reflections on contemporary connections. This space invites the audience to think of weaving as a language that links people, memories, and territories, enabling collective and sensory experiences.

Es Baluard organizes Eugenio Dittborn. Pinturas Aeropostales, the first solo show in Spain of Eugenio Dittborn (Santiago, Chile, 1943), one of the key names in the development of Latin American conceptual art in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition focuses on the production of his aeropostal paintings, an artistic instrument that materializes his research and reflection on materials, the physical limits that constrain painting and its distribution and circulation.

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Santiago, Chile, presents Trabajo de campo (Fieldwork), the first retrospective exhibition of the multidisciplinary artist, curated by Joselyne Contreras, at its Parque Forestal venue.

The Chiloé Museum of Modern Art presents its 37th edition featuring photographs, paintings, sculptures, installations, performances, videos, and digital cinema in the exhibition Espectral (Spectral), which invites viewers to explore what stirs unease: the mysterious, the ethereal, and the unknown.

Pinta Miami brings together artists who explore the identity, memory and cultural diversity of Ibero-America. In this 2024 edition, several proposals seek to redefine the Latinx notion from unique and transformative perspectives.

The Pinta Miami 2024 edition -from December 5 to 8- presents proposals that enhance the Latin American gene. Arte al Día highlights four galleries from four Latin American countries: Petrus Gallery in Puerto Rico, Proyecto H in Spain and Mexico, Salar Gallery in Bolivia and Judas Gallery in Chile.

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) announced two winners of the inaugural Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize: Julian Charrière (b. 1987 in Morges, Switzerland; lives and works in Berlin, Germany) and Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948 in Santiago, Chile; lives and works in New York, NY and Santiago, Chile). Each artist will receive 100,000 USD and institutional support from MOCA to develop a commissioned project addressing the critical intersections of art, climate change, and environmental justice.

Rutas relacionales (Relational Routes) is the long-term collective with which the Lucía Mendoza gallery celebrates its tenth anniversary and with which it intends to raise awareness, through the work of about 40 artists, about several of the current thematic and philosophical axes, those that trace their need from the relationship of mankind with its environment. In these axes, we find lines of argument that deal with ecology, society and economies, passing through everything that composes them, such as political processes or the construction of identity. 

Larivière Foundation opens two exhibitions: Ideas Fijas (Fixed Ideas), by Cecilia Szalkowicz, curated by Mariano Mayer; and Carrusel de melancolías (Carousel of Melancholy), by renowned Chilean photographer Leonora Vicuña, curated by Alexis Fabry.

Germán Tagle (Santiago, Chile, 1976) returns to Madrid's Daniel Cuevas, where he held his first exhibition two years ago, with El territorio portátil, a show in which the Chilean artist returns to the axes of landscape, painting and culture that have been the backbone of his latest productions.

Why highlight stories that often remain on the periphery of artistic discourse? Adriano Pedrosa justifies his curatorial decision with works by 331 artists -mostly from the global south- that open the way to powerful narratives. Finally, we see the axis being twisted. It is difficult to escape the white gaze, more so to move authentically through a Eurocentric space. Given this, the communicative reach of figuration serves to challenge the symbolic order of domination and destabilize the colonial project. The stories that are made explicit and the narratives of magic and everyday life help to recognize without revictimizing. 

Pilar Elgueta (Chile) is the selected artist for the Delfina Foundation’s Residency Program during Summer 2024. The artist-explorer activates ideas and images around the relation between the human being and landscape.

The exhibition of the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale - Stranieri Ovunque (Foregneirs Everywhere) - curated by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, presents 331 artists, significantly more than the usual number. More than a third of those artists come from Latin America.

Álbum de Casi Todos (Album of Almost Everyone) is the solo exhibition of Chilean artist Pablo Linsambarth at the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano (ICPNA). It is curated by Daniel H. Rey.

The jury of the IV Mediterranean Albert Camus Prize –composed of Javier Gomá, who acts as its president, and N’Goné Fall, Miquel Molina, José Luis Pérez Pont and Anne Prouteau– decided to unanimously award Alfredo Jaar the 2024 edition prize.

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) presented Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: The Awake Volcanoes, the first solo show in a U.S. Museum for the Chilean artist, known for her participation at the 2022 Venice Biennale and being the recipient of the prestigious Käthe Kollwitz Prize for 2023.

The EFG Latin American Art Award, together with ArtNexus, announced Fernanda López Quilodráan from Santiago, (Chile), as one of the finalists for the annual acquisition award, whose winner will be announced at Pinta Miami during Miami Art Week.

Soñar el agua, una retrospectiva del futuro (1964-...) [Dreaming of Water, a Retrospective of the Future (1964-...)] is the most comprehensive exhibition at MALBA dedicated to this day to the poet, visual artist and feminist activist Cecilia Vicuña (Santiago de Chile, 1948). It is under the curatorship of Miguel A. López.

Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims is Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s first solo exhibition in Austria at Kunstalle Wien. It is centered around the presentation of new work.

The Portland Biennale, organized by Converge 45 together with Chilean writer and curator Christian Viveros-Fauné, centers on the idea of art-as-a-social-form: contemporary and historical artworks that take the measure of their era in order to respond directly to the challenges of their time.