Born in Buenos Aires,Argentina, in 1977.
Basualdo studied Fine Arts at the National Institute ofVisual Arts (IUNA). He participated in different national and international scholarships such as the “Kuitca Scholarship”, in Buenos Aires; the “Scowhegan School of painting and sculpture”, in Maine, United States and the “SAM Art Project”, in Paris, France. Installations, sculptures, objets and drawings work between the visual arts and theatre fields. Some of his recent solo shows are: Pupila, Museo de arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2022);The Head of Goliath, Usina del Arte, Buenos Aires (2018),Arena, MuBE – Museu Brasileiro de Escultura e Ecologia, São Paulo (2017),The End of Ending, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (2016),Theory (The Head of Goliath), Palais deTokyo & SAM Art Projects. Paris (2014) and Nerve, Musée Départemental d’Art Contemporain de Rochechouart, Limoges, France (2013).
Among other group shows, his work participated in the biennials ofVenice (2015), Gwangju, Korea (2014); of Montevideo (2012), Lyon, France (2011), Mercosur, Brazil (2009); Pontevedra, Spain (2006).
Since 2003 he’s been part of the Argentine artist collective Provisorio/Permanente.
His works are part of numerous private and public collections such as, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,Washington; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; Musée d Art Contemporain de Rochechouart; Musée d’Art Contemporain Les Abattoirs,Toulouse; At stake in Basualdo’s art is an imaginary that reflects on the tension between language and the body as builders of reality.The artist makes use of fiction to expand cartographies, to generate territories where all there seems to be is a line. His work summons viewers to an experience in the present time; it suggests a fragile balance on the verge of breaking; it dares us, on occasion, to heighten our senses. The principles that govern space, the body, and reason engage in dialogue to shape an experience of freedom in a physical and philosophical sense.
Basualdo’s installations are akin to landscapes steeped in dramatic tension where the viewer is asked to play a leading role in a palpable fiction. He tackles the category of the sublime with a sense of darkness: Viewers are captives of an imposing image while also, somehow, eagerly awaiting something that never happens to happen. Danger and curiosity vie in unabating contradiction.
In his sculptural works, which are themselves included in some of his installations, the artist formulates an unsettling relationship between everyday objects (glasses, knives, candles, etc.) and between those objects and the space such that the former become symbolic and uncanny. His installations often make use of sound, usually emitted by the objects in random sequence.
In his sculpture, he often uses black foil, a material common in theatrical lighting, to produce enormous jagged volumes that are extremely light—another startling contradiction. He has used that material to make giant hanging pieces that take up entire galleries of exhibition venues. In his drawings, the recurrent use of the line, the fold, and the cut generate a tension between the dimension of the physical support and the dimension of thought.
Musée d’Art Contemporain FRAC Corsica;Adrastus Collection,Arevalo; Juan e PatriciaVergez, Buenos Aires; Tiroche de Leon Collection, Israel; CiFo, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, among others