The Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires is proud this year to have acquired the work Escribir [To Write] (2016) by Sofía Bohtlingk (Buenos Aires, 1976). It is currently on display in our Moderno and MetaModerno exhibition. The painting bears a close relation to the works collected here: both painting and drawings chime with the title the artist has chosen for this exhibition of works on paper: El ritmo es el mejor orden [Rhythm is the Best Order]. This phrase of Peruvian choreographer and composer Victoria Santa Cruz has deeply inspired the artist. It encapsulates Sofía’s devoted attitude towards the work of creation.
For over a decade now, Sofía Bohtlingk’s art has been developing out of corporeal action. Her paintings and drawings stand for bodily rhythms that become rigorous brushstrokes, lines and visual gestures. It is as if each work were an extension of her body striving to reach out and embrace the world while, in the process, becoming a medium, a giver of life and art. Sofia’s body and the body of her art are inextricably one in her oeuvre, and their union is a foundational existential element in understanding her artistic practice.
I caught sight of one of her drawings a couple of years ago: Creo que estoy rebalsando de imágenes [It Feels Like I’m Heaving with Images]. It was an astonishing depiction of a figure that was more than human. I followed the life of that work until Sofia brought it to the Moderno to put on display together with fifty kindred drawings, abstract and figurative. In that act of display – of turning the Museum into her studio, her home – we understood the profound dialogue between the spiritual – almost mystical – quest of Sofia’s art and her creative process.
This exhibition shares the intimacy of that encounter and that work with the Moderno’s public. It is as if Sofia were drawing back the curtain on a private theatre where there is an urgent need to make, to not hold back and, uninterrupted, to sustain the beating of the hand and follow the rhythms of the mind.
Victoria Noorthoorn
Curated by: Victoria Noorthoorn
Special thanks to: Alfredo Aracil, Nora Fisch, Fernando García and Iván Rösler
Sofía Bohtlingk (Buenos Aires, 1976) studied painting with Sergio Bazán. From 2009 to 2010, she attended the Artists Programme at the Torcuato Di Tella University (UTDT) under the direction of Jorge Macchi. In 2010–2011, she received a scholarship under the fifth edition of the Kuitca Scholarship, directed by Guillermo Kuitca.
Bohtlingk explores different possibilities in the development of painting based on the bodily movements involved in its production. Her works fall within pictorial abstraction, not from a compositional viewpoint, but through her staging of the relationship that the body establishes with the canvas in an approach combining the act of painting with performance strategies.
She has participated in numerous solo exhibitions, including La Tierra fue una vez un animal gigante [The Earth Was Once a Giant Animal] (Galería Appetite, 2008), Las confesiones [The Confessions] (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario, 2012) and Espada [Sword] (Galería Nora Fisch, Buenos Aires, 2017). In 2019, she won Third Prize in the Senior Category awarded by the Amalita Foundation.
The group exhibitions in which she has participated include: Pintura Post [Post Painting], curated by Cristina Schiavi (Fundación Osde, 2015); Omnidireccional [Omnidirectional], curated by Mariano Mayer (Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2015); the fifth edition of the Bellos Jueves [Beautiful Thursdays] cycle, curated by Javier Villa (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2015); 19th Klemm Foundation Prize for Visual Arts (2016); rro, curated by Sarah Demeuse and Javier Villa (‘Dixit’ section, Arteba, 2017); the third edition of the Braque Prize (MUNTREF Contemporary Art Centre, 2017); Las decisiones del tacto [Decisions of Tact], one of the exhibitions comprising En el ejercicio de las cosas [In the Practice of Things] as part of Argentina Plataforma ARCO, curated by Sonia Becce and Mariano Mayer (Madrid, 2017); Sacarse el sombrero para saludar [Removing Your Hat in Greeting], directed by Santiago Bengolea (Proa 21, 2018); Zig Zag, curated by Juan José Cambre for the Alec Oxenford Collection (2018); Iteraciones sobre lo no mismo [Iterations On the Non-Same], curated by Guillermina Mongan and Gonzalo Lagos (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, 2019); the Cuerpos blandos [Soft Bodies] project, directed by Lucrecia Palacios in conversation with the exhibition Reina de Corazones [Queen of Hearts] by Delia Cancela (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 2019); Asamblea de pájaros [An Assembly of Birds], video and performance work developed with Florencia Rodríguez Giles and Julieta García Vázquez, commissioned by the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2021).
Her work features in numerous public and private collections. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.