Museo Moderno
Bohtlingk Sofía
Escultura, 2013. Oil on canvas. 200 x 230 cm.

Sofia Bohtlingk (Buenos Aires, 1976) explores different possibilities for the development of painting through the body movements involved in its production. Her works are inscribed within the pictorial abstraction, but not from the composition, but by staging the relationship that the body establishes with the canvas, in an approach that combines the act of painting with performance strategies. The writer María Gainza observed that “if [the artist] opened her arms like the Vitruvian Man, her size corresponded exactly to the size of the squares”. Her works record traces of actions, choreographies of rhythmic gestures or the traces of the canvas that, as it folds and falls, mark its surface. By thematizing both painting and the body, the passage of time becomes a central element. In this sense, wrinkles and roughness function at the same time in the construction process of her works, but they also point out the traces that time digs in the skin, generating a metaphorical equivalence between the outer layer of the body and the support of the painting. Lucrecia Palacios notes that some of her pieces leave apparently unfinished areas on the canvas in view, “as if they were not trying to build an image, but to show the register of the rough contact between the brush and the support”. In 2010-2011 she received a scholarship for the fifth edition of the Kuitca / UTDT scholarship within the framework of the Art Department of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, directed by Guillermo Kuitca. During the period 2009-2010 she attended the Artists Program of the same university, directed by Jorge Macchi. Previously, she studied painting with Sergio Bazán. She has participated in numerous solo exhibitions, including Ilusión y bochorno (2023) and Espada at Galería Nora Fisch (2017); Las confesiones at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario (2012) and La Tierra fue una vez un animal gigante at Galería Appetite (2008), among many others. In 2019 he won the Third Prize in the Senior Category awarded by the Amalita Foundation. In 2021 she made Asamblea de pájaros, a video and performance work developed together with Florencia Rodríguez Giles and Julieta García Vázquez, commissioned by the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. Among numerous group shows, she also participated in Iteraciones sobre lo no mismo, curated by Guillermina Mongan and Gonzalo Lagos (2019); Cuerpos Blandos, a project directed by Lucrecia Palacios in dialogue with the exhibition Reina de Corazones by Delia Cancela at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2019). Her work is part of numerous public and private collections and was part of Zig Zag, the show curated by Juan José Cambre for the Alex Oxenford Collection (2018). She also participated in Sacarse el sombrero para saludar at Proa 21, directed by Santiago Bengolea; de rro, curated by Sarah Demeuse and Javier Villa in the “Dixit” section of Arteba (2017). She was invited to the third edition of the Braque Prize, at Muntref Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (2017). In 2016 she participated in Las decisiones del tacto, one of the exhibitions that encompassed “En el ejercicio de las cosas” in the framework of Argentina Plataforma ARCO, curated by Sonia Becce and Mariano Mayer, Madrid (2017) and the XIX Premio Fundación Klemm a las Artes Visuales (2016). In 2015 she participated in Pintura Post Post, at Fundación Osde, curated by Cristina Schiavi; Omnidireccional, at Centro Cultural Recoleta, curated by Mariano Mayer, and the fifth edition of the cycle “Bellos Jueves”, curated by Javier Villa at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, among others.