Cynthia Kampelmacher (Buenos Aires, 1968) addresses image perception and memory as processes that affect subjectivity. Her work, based on photographs of tree shadow projections and intricate jungle views, revolves around the impossibility of mimetic representation, placing it in different spaces and contexts. Her images may be considered abstract, but they are placed in a limit of vision that allows for the identification of a notion of topography or landscape.
Kampelmacher takes the motif of the patterns formed by vegetation, generating infinite variations: her “jungle tangles” -as she calls them- refer to a vision of nature and landscape as the basic axis of the history of painting. She considers that landscape as a genre enables “a kind of insistence, of different ways of approaching, of mapping, of trapping what is basically ungraspable. And because of this impossibility, one then returns and insists in different ways”. In this insistence, the pieces are transformed into drawings, paintings, objects, installations and site-specific interventions that sensitize the gaze, altering the observer’s point of view and in turn promoting a reflection on what we see and the impossibility of a univocal and permanent answer, “a commitment to dematerialization and uncertainty” -she synthesizes-.
Among her procedures, she adopts transparency and tracing, the idea of placing a veil in front that conceptually hides and reveals the image, scratching and intervening directly on the images in some cases: these are different attempts to cross the image plane, or to emphasize the front or the back. “These veils function as such but at the same time as a perforation, as when they pierce the surface of the photographic paper…. But also, before the movement of the eye, the image appears or disappears, becoming ungraspable. It is the problem of that which cannot be trapped. That’s why I also choose the image of the tangles, because when you are there, you are lost, it’s like in a big spider’s web” -declares Kampelmacher.
Recently, she has been distinguished with the Konex Award for Visual Arts 2012-2022 (2022) and the First Prize in Drawing at the National Visual Arts Salon (2021); Site-Specific Artwork Award, San Martín Cultural Center, Buenos Aires (2016); Cultural Equality Acquisition Award, National Secretariat of Culture. Argentina (2013); Second Acquisition Award, Salón Nacional Finochietto, Argentina (2013) and the First National Art Biennial Award, MACBBCA – MAC. Bahía Blanca, Argentina (2009); among other awards. She obtained a Grant to the Creation National Fund for the Arts (2021); the Extraordinary Grant Alec Oxenford Collection (2020); the Travel Grant Alec Oxenford Collection to attend a residency in Panama (2019); she received a Grant from the Scholarship Program of the Culture Ministry of Culture of the Nation (2016). She was invited to participate in URRA, residency for artists in Buenos Aires (2011) and obtained a grant from the National Fund for the Arts (2010); the Isla Contadora Workshop Grant, Fundación Carolina and Fundación LLópis- Panama (2008); the Línea Creadores Grant from the Metropolitan Fund of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires (2008). He participated in the Intercampos II-Fundación Telefónica Scholarship Program.
Argentina (2006); the Antorchas Foundation Grant (2003) for a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Canada (2004) and the Kuitca Grant – Rojas Cultural Center, University of Buenos Aires (2003 – 2005).
She has presented numerous solo exhibitions, including Revelación de un mundo (2019), curated by Lara Marmor and Sebastián Vidal Mackinson; Reinscripción de un paisaje. Ejercicio pour la galerie, at Galería Nora Fisch and Aquí y ahora – Studio #15 at Flora Ars+natura, Bogotá (both, 2017); Sostén (una columna, un dibujo circular) at Centro Cultural San Martín (2016); Construir una poética (2015) at Galería Nora Fisch; Maraña noche (2012) at Jolie art, Nunca se sabe – You Never Know (2011) at Galería Nora Fisch; Un proyecto especial (2007) at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario, MACRO, Rosario; Saltar desde el vacío (1998) at Espacio Giesso.
Among numerous group exhibitions, she participated in Anonymous Drawing, Galerie Im Körnerpark, Berlin (2022); Premio 8M, CCK; Salón Nacional de artes visuales, Casa Nacional del Bicentenario; Concurso Nacional UADE de Artes Visuales, UADEart (all three, 2021); Premio Trabucco Dibujo, guest of the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo E. Sívori, Buenos Aires; Una comunidad imaginada, FNA competition, Casa Nacional del Bicentenario; Itaú Award, Casa Nacional del Bicentenario; 62nd Salón Manuel Belgrano, Museo E. Sívori; XXII Klemm Award, Klemm Foundation; Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales, Casa Nacional del Bicentenario (2018); Soberanía del uso, apropiaciones de lo cotidiano en la escena contemporánea (2014), curated by Federico Baeza and Sebastián Vidal Mackinson, Osde Foundation, among many others.
Her works are part of public and private collections in Argentina and Panama, Italy, USA, Belgium, Canada, Chile and Spain. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.