Marta Chilindron
Sicardi Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Dialogues, an exhibition of new sculptures and paintings by Marta Chilindron and Graciela Hasper. Both artists will be present for an opening reception, from 6-8 pm on Thursday, July 10.
In Dialogues, both artists explore geometry and transparency within their respective practices. Chilindron's brightly-colored acrylic sculptures range from 12-inch cubes to almost 6-foot high movable trapezoids and spirals. Hinged together, these works can be reconfigured into variations on each shape, creating an interactive conversation with the viewer. Hasper's untitled acrylic paintings on canvas also take geometry as their starting point. Overlapping and repeated shapes in a palette of bold colors are layered to allow for surprising juxtapositions and vibrant relationships between forms. Hasper's paintings, like Chilindron's sculptures, are not fixed in space; they can be installed vertically or horizontally, or changed over the course of the exhibition. Dialogues places these exquisite constructions and paintings in counterpoint with one another, pointing out their conceptual and aesthetic points of intersection.
About the Artists:
Born in Buenos Aires, Marta Chilindron was raised in Montevideo and relocated to New York in 1969, where she attended the State University of New York in Old Westbury. She studied at the Camnitzer-Porter Studio in Valdottavo, Italy and in New York, with Julio Alpuy, an Uruguayan artist trained by Joaquín Torres-García. She completed numerous public works, some in collaboration with Eduardo Costa. In the late 1990s, Chilindron began making collapsible sculptures, using hinges to allow the objects to be moved and changed. For her 1999 solo exhibition at El Museo del Barrio in New York, she constructed an object that changed from flat plane to a three-dimensional structure that replicated movie theater seats and a screen. In 2000, Chilindron received a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant and began working with transparent materials. Her work has expanded to include the exploration of layered colors and moveable geometric forms. "I like to see all the sides of the work without walking around," she says. "You can stay still and walk with your mind around the works."
Chilindron's first public installations were created for the City University of New York (1986, 1987). Her work has been shown in important group exhibitions such as Asterismos: Nuevas Visiones de la Abstraccion Geometrica en el Sur, Museo de Arte de las Americas, Washington, D.C. (2014); Fokus Lodz Biennale 2010, Lodz, Poland (2010); The Sites of Latin America Abstraction, MOLAA, Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA (2009) and CIFO (Cisneros Fontanals Foundation), Miami, FL (2006). Among others, she has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, CA (2013); State University of New York, Old Westbury (2006); and El Museo del Barrio, New York (1999). Work by the artist is held in collections including Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, USA; Cisneros Fontanal Art Foundation, Miami, Florida, USA; El Museo del Barrio, New York, New York, USA; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., USA; and Sayago & Pardon Collection, Los Angeles, California, USA.
Graciela Hasper has followed a self-directed course of study in the arts, working with Diana Aisenberg between 1987 and 1991, and taking classes in philosophy and art history in her native city of Buenos Aires. In 1993, Hasper participated in an exhibition curated by Jorge Gumier Maier, Nicolás Guagnini, and Pablo Siquier, held at the Centro Cultural Rojas de Buenos Aires. Titled Crimen y Ornamento, the exhibition was one of the first to explicitly link the generation of 1990s artists in Buenos Aires with mid-century abstraction. “In Argentina, abstraction was repressed because it did not ‘explain’ national values. It had no value. So I adopted something that had no value and tried to make it valuable, an act of resistance. My work reflects the way a younger artist can respond to Madí, to the abstraction of the 1940s and 1950s,” Hasper observes. Since the 1990s, Hasper’s painting aesthetic has been clean and direct, marked by sharp orthogonal lines and bright color. In 2000, she completed her first residency in the United States, at Apex Art in New York with a Fulbright / FNA Grant. In 2002, she participated in the Chinati Foundation residency. Her most recent work has expanded to a larger scale, even encompassing architectural interventions. For her 2013 public project for the city of Buenos Aires at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMBA), Nudo de Autopista, Hasper painted the columns of several intersecting knots of highways in Buenos Aires.
Hasper's first solo exhibition was in 1990, at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires. She subsequently had solo shows at the Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, Buenos Aires (1991), Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, Buenos Aires (1992), Alianza Francesa, Buenos Aires (1999), the Locker Plant, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2002), the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2013), and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2013-2014). Her work has been shown in numerous important group exhibitions at Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA, 2013), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires (MACBA, 2012), Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas (2011), Americas Society, New York (2007); Project Row Houses, Houston, Texas (2003); Museo Nacional Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires (2000); and Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, Buenos Aires (1993). She is represented in the Bill Gates Foundation Collection, Diane & Bruce Halle Collection, Museo de Arte de Latinoamerica de Buenos Aires (MALBA) Fundación Costantini, Buenos Aires, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Museo Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, Museo Arte Contemporáneo de Bahia Blanca, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid.
