On the fringes of the night and in the glow of the parties, between papers and words, Bárbara Bianca LaVogue (1970-2018) passed like a flash of lightning through the Buenos Aires nightlife scene, building and injecting vitality into her unique world, from the late 1980s until her final days. Her vibrant and hypnotic strokes give her images that same intensity that she applied to her life, and she portrayed the friendships, muses, drag queens and diversity of dissidents that surrounded her, together with the heels, jewels and accessories that reveal her close ties to fashion. She left her indelible mark in each of her drawings, just as she did in each night, catwalk or club in which she appeared. A gesture of beauty and an affirmation of her identity. ‘I’m an artist, because I am Bianca, because I am LaVogue, I am an urban legend,’ she declared with certainty.
Tu presencia en mí [Your Presence in Me] is on view in the Café of the Museo Moderno, allowing LaVogue’s drawings and paintings to once again inhabit a space made for socializing, conversation and debate. Like a vibrant archive of the Buenos Aires underground scene, her images reveal faces and bodies made up of innocent and fragile gestures. The selection of works reveals her passion for glamour, parties and a cartography of desires, yet it also shows her devotion to an intimate faith, a spiritual quest, and her dedication to the friendships that were her sanctuary.
Today, her works re-emerge with the same vitality and urgency that led to their creation, occupying space, reaffirming her presence, and reminding us that memory is not just an archive of the past, but a force that is reactivated in the present.
Original idea: Álvaro Rufiner
Curated by: Rodrigo Barcos, con la colaboración de Raúl Flores y Victoria Noorthoorn
Exhibition design: Job Salorio y Victoria Noorthoorn
Mural design: Job Salorio
Production: Edgar Lacombe
Mural execution: Fátima Baroni
Special thanks: Andrea Gorostidi, Juan Queiroz y Asociación Amigos del Moderno
Bárbara Bianca LaVogue (Buenos Aires, 1970–2018) was an undisputed star of the Buenos Aires underground circuit between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. As a visual artist, choreographer, mentor to supermodels, drag queen, nightlife personality, clubber, and larger-than-life figure on the street scene, her personality lit up art galleries, fashion runways, and nightclubs like Freedom, El Dorado, Club Caniche, Ave Porco, Morocco, Cocoliche, La Age of Comunication, Bunker, K2 and Kim & Novak, among so many others. She worked as an assistant to artists, designers and photographers such as Sergio De Loof, Charly Grill and Marcelo Setton. Her artistic output, spanning her entire life, includes a vast number of drawings, paintings and collages that she both created and sold in the clubs that she frequented. Her first exhibition, Inmuna [Immune], was held in 1999 at Espacio Giesso, in the San Telmo neighbourhood. Ten years later, she held her second solo show, Carísima [Very Expensive], at the Miau Miau gallery.