El límite [The Limit] is an exhibition of works from the Museo Moderno’s collection set in dialogue with works by guest artists, which marks the opening of the 2022 exhibition programme, Un día en la Tierra [One Day on Earth]. This programme develops a holistic discourse around urgently needed reflection about humanity’s present and its relationship with the planet.
The exhibition spans two galleries. In the first, the artists tackle the pain of traumatic experiences. The works set out to signpost and repair, denouncing the monstrous presence of military dictatorships and wars, femicides, and the patriarchal and colonial aggression brought to bear on racialised bodies and populations.
The second gallery focuses on an artistic ecology linked to the land, its natural resources and the knowledge that arises from these. Here the artists critique human and territorial devastation, directing their attention towards the more sensitive ways of relating to territory and to ancestral knowledge about nature.
The Limit is an exhibition comprised of a core of significant works selected from more than 600 that have entered the Museo Moderno’s collection in recent years as either donations or acquisitions. On the subject of donations, the Museum is grateful to the artists, their families, gallery owners, institutions and patrons who have made this possible. Acquisitions are the result of a public-private stewardship programme. The Museum therefore wishes to thank the Acquisitions Committee, the Asociación de Amigos, the Buenos Aires City Government and all the artists, gallery owners and donors who allow the Museo Moderno to better represent the vitality and relevance of the contemporary art scene in Argentina.
Curators: Victoria Noorthoorn, Javier Villa, Marcos Krämer y Violeta González Santos
The Limit Exhibition Factory
We invite you to watch another episode of La fábrica [The Factory], the cycle in which different workers from all departments of the museum tell us about their experiences putting together our exhibitions. In this episode, we will learn about the making of El límite [The Limit], one of 11 exhibitions that are part of the Museo Moderno’s 2022 programme Un día en la tierra [One Day on Earth]. Presenting their experiences are Marcos Krämer, curator, Ivan Rösler, head of exhibition design, and Alejandra Aguado, head of collections.
Portrait - Lucrecia Lionti
Lucrecia Lionti (Tucumán, 1985) is participating in the Un día en la Tierra [One Day on Earth] programme at the museum, showing two of her works in the Vida abstracta [Life in the Abstract] and El límite [The Limit] exhibitions. Lionti’s artistic output includes embroidered textiles and installations that display words and phrases related to the political, social and cultural context of Latin America. In her work, Exaltar la economía [Exalting the Economy], the artist combines references to the emblematic discourse and shapes of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención [Concrete-Invention Art Association] and the Madí movement with her own personal and pictorial concerns. In one of her pieces, inspired by the cutout frame technique, she displays the words “Exaltar la óptica” [“Exalting the Optics”]. This is one of the key phrases of the 1946 Inventionist Manifesto and yet, here, she superimposes a new phrase on top of it: “Exaltar la economía” [“Extol the Economy”], pointing to an issue that troubled her at a time of deep financial unrest and instability. Elsewhere, her work Piedrazo y escala de negros [Stone and Black Scale] focuses on the police shootings that occurred between 2017 and 2018 in Argentina. The artist was deeply moved by these situations and decided to create this work in which she combines the roughness of sacking with a soft felt to represent the fragility of civilians in the face of police violence.
Portrait - Tomás Espina
Tomás Espina (Buenos Aires, 1975) is a participant in the museum’s Un día en la Tierra [One Day on Earth] programme, where he is showing his work Haití [Haiti] as part of the exhibition El límite [The Limit]. Espina studied at the Escuela Nacional de Arte Prilidiano Pueyrredón. He works with a wide variety of mediums – interventions, actions, videos, drawings, and paintings – and has been influenced by the traditions of Dark Romanticism, German expressionism, the works of Goya and Brueghel the Elder, alchemist iconography and some experiments of the historical avant-garde. He has received grants from the Argentine Secretary of Culture as well as the Atlantic Center for the Arts (United States, 2004) and has won awards in different competitions and from different institutions in the country. His piece, Haití, is comprised of a group of clay heads which are displayed on wooden shelves, in an imitation of what one may typically see at an archaeological museum. The heads are deformed and create the feel of a mortuary or ritualistic atmosphere in which the idea of these as an offering and as a transmutation are reinforced by his use of the clay. By imitating objects from primitive cultures, the artist draws on representations of the past to establish a strange identification with the objects, thus guiding the viewer into an imaginary that is at once indigenous and shamanistic but that also evokes the violence inflicted on the body and the territory.
Portrait – Gabriel Baggio
Gabriel Baggio (Buenos Aires, 1974) features in the Un día en la Tierra [One Day on Earth] programme, where his work Matar y morir [Kill and Die] is included in the exhibition El límite [The Limit]. His artistic output includes both object-based works and performance projects that reflect on the recovery and transformation of cultural narratives and the place of crafts and symbols in social, emotional, identity and historical processes. Baggio participated in the Yaxs + Urra artist residency in Guatemala City and was also invited by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México to participate in Performagia´07 (Mexico City, Mexico). He was awarded a grant by the TriangleArt Trust to participate in the Hong Kong International Artist’s Workshop (China) and is a recipient of the Unesco-Aschberg grant. He has received several awards over the course of his career, including the First Prize for Ceramics a the Salón Nacional (2019) and the Second Prize for Visual Arts from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes (2016). His works can be found in public and private collections and he has featured in exhibitions at institutes in Argentina and around the world. His piece Matar y morir was born out of a detailed study of the art history serials collected by his family. These informative publications inspired him to construct a sculptural frieze composed of tragic, dying and ghastly figures lifted from emblematic works of European art, ranging from classical antiquities to colonial paintings. On the basis of this study of death through images from an intentionally Western canon of beauty, Baggio focused on the capacity of artistic images to transmit suffering and created his own interpretations of them in glazed ceramic form, a material he uses frequently in his work.
Gabriel Buenos Aires (Argentina), 1974 – where he resides
Matar y morir [Kill and Die], 2020. Glazed ceramic with gold lustre. Private collection Courtesy of the ArtHaus Foundation.