With this exhibition, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires celebrates the artistic career of the great Argentinian artist Dalila Puzzovio (Buenos Aires, 1942) to mark more than six decades of achievements and underscore her relevance to the present day.
Dalila burst onto the Argentinian scene in the early 1960s with disturbing objects created from orthopaedic casts. In her plastercasts, she began her exploration of the body, its limits and expressive possibilities, an inquiry that would run throughout the rest of her work.
In 1967, her famous double-platform shoes made her a permanent icon of Buenos Aires Pop, while her bold ventures into fashion, design and art in the public space pushed back the very boundaries of artistic creation. For Dalila, art and fashion form ‘an alphabet through which to convey different narratives’, a vocabulary to help us re-invent ourselves and build our own portrait in total freedom, while developing the different personalities through which we present ourselves to the world in acts of pure invention.
The exhibition brings together her most emblematic works in parallel with a vast documentary archive of unpublished material, photographs and records of key works in Argentinian art. In dialogue with the artist, we also have reconstructed significant works and relevant spaces from her career, such as her out-sized corsets, which announced her grand entrance into the Pop imaginary, or some of her most iconic costumes. We have also restored her legendary Self-Portrait of 1966 to its original monumental scale.
In this retrospective, we present Dalila Puzzovio as an artist of striking contemporary relevance whose work with the body, fashion and identity anticipated today’s debates about the role of women in society and consolidated her place as a key figure in the history of Argentinian art.
Curated by: Pino Monkes, Museo Moderno Head of Conservation, and Patricio Orellana, Museo Moderno Curator.
Exhibition Design: Iván Rösler, Head of Exhibition Design and Production.
Production: Laura Roldán, Producer.
Dalila Puzzovio (Buenos Aires, 1942) is renowned in Argentina for her original and pioneering approach that puts her artistic career at the crossroads of art and fashion. After participating in seminal exhibitions that marked a turning point in modern art in the first half of the 1960s (El hombre antes del hombre [Man before Man], La Muerte [Death], Objetos 64 [Objects 64]) and her fascinating solo exhibition Cáscaras [Shells] (Lirolay, 1963), Puzzovio rose to prominence as part of the Instituto Di Tella scene. There, she was awarded the Di Tella National Prize for Dalila autorretrato [Dalila Self-Portrait] (1966) and, the following year, won the Di Tella International Prize for Dalila doble plataforma [Dalila Double Platform]. These two works consolidated her position as a pop icon and led to her deepening her exploration of the body and of the relationships between art, fashion and the media. That same decade, she also took part in important international exhibitions, such as New Art of Argentina (1964), organised by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Buenos Aires 64, organised by the Museo de Arte Moderno, at the Pepsi-Cola Exhibition Gallery in New York. Puzzovio also took part in collective artistic actions in the public space, such as ¿Por qué son tan geniales? [Why Are They So Cool?] (1965) and Mientras unos destruyen, otros construyen [While Some Destroy, Others Build] (1979). She also designed costumes for film, theatre and television, and excelled in several roles in the fashion industry. In the 1980s and 1990s, she also oversaw the design of different spaces in renowned architectural projects.
Self-Portrait: The Playlist
Dalila Puzzovio: Self-Portrait
