Elba Bairon: untitled

Untitled is the first large-scale project that the sculptor Elba Bairon (La Paz, Bolivia, 1947) has made to date: a construction of strange dimensions and straight edges placed in an unsettling, unreal context. With this artwork, Bairon seeks to create a precise image in which the purity of the forms is paramount and the simplicity of the lines verges on the diaphanous. It is constructed from a soft shapes emerging from organic forms, a concept the artist describes as ‘emotional geometry’.

In a culture focussed on excess and overproduction, the artist appeals to our senses of sight, hearing and touch. In Untitled, the whiteness of the surfaces, the weightlessness of the figures, the simplicity of the lines and even the lack of a title mean that Bairon’s work resists classification: her installations call for absolute silence.

When Bairon was five years old, she moved from her native Bolivia to Uruguay where she studied sculpture at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Montevideo and Chinese painting at the Biblioteca Nacional. In 1967 she moved definitively to Buenos Aires. Notable solo exhibitions of her work include those held at the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas (1997 and 2004), the Macro-Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Rosario (2007), Zabaleta Lab (2011), Malba, Fundación Costantini (2013), the Fundación Federico Jorge Klemm (2014), the Universidad de La Plata (2015) and Galería Pasaje 17 (2017).