THREE ARTISTS FROM ARGENTINA
Juan Carlos Stekelman (1936-2015) was a leading Argentine painter and print maker. He started his artistic studies at the Buenos Aires University of Engineering, before transferring to the Manuel Belgrano School of Arts and graduating in 1962. In the mid-1960s he travelled to the United States of America where he continued his artistic education and was invited to hold an individual exhibition at the Panamerican Union in Washington.
Throughout the 1960s he contributed illustrations to satirical magazines such as Tia Vicente.
In 1968 Stekelman married and moved to England He continued to paint and held exhibitions in London, Oxford, Brighton and Leicester. In 1978 he worked as a translator and guide for Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa when they signed for Tottenham Hotspurs Football Club. In 1989 he moved back to his homeland and settled in Buenos Aires.
This exhibition presents paintings from the 1960s and 1970s. Stuart and John Evans met Juan Carlos Stekelman at his studio in Buenos Aires in 2011. We were very excited to find these paintings by an artist completely unknown to us who was clearly the master of his own style with a strong personal vision yet who paralleled late Picasso and early Hockney. This led to an exhibition at the Frankendael Foundation in Amsterdam in 2012 with the catalogue Juan Carlos Stekelman Early Works (1965-1975) followed by an exhibition at Austin/Desmond Fine Art in London in 2013.
The artist had been painting for over fifty years, working on paper in gouache and acrylic and, from around 1955 onwards, making small edition linocuts. Throughout his career, Stekelman has remained consistently faithful to the figurative in his oeuvre. His drawings, paintings and prints obsessively re- work the forms and expressions of people and animals. These mysterious figures are created from dreams rather than recognizable models, embodying a psychological escape into another world of the imagination, evoking both humour and horror in the same instant.
As Professor Dawn Ades CBE FBA says in her preface to the catalogue, “Stekelman upends the conventions of portraiture, creating with his close-up heads and busts a striking array of idiosyncratic and sometimes recognisable characters. His work needs to be brought into critical debates about figurative expressionism of this period, but at the same time appreciated and understood for its unique, individual character.”
Ignacio Chico (Buenos Aires, 1986) lives and works in London. He has a master's degree in Contemporary Practices from the Royal College of Art (2022), in addition to a bachelor’ degree in Visual Arts from the National University of Art of Argentina (2017), and studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York (2015) and at Central Saint Martins London (2014).
His most recent paintings reference very personal concerns regarding the artist’s Catholic upbringing - he is the son of a military father (an ex- combatant in the Falkland Islands War) and a psychoanalyst mother - and how these factors determine his interpretation of the world, his memories, heritage and emotional spectrum. In the works presented in this exhibition, he explores a sequence from his past which he can't fully remember, where he tries to make sense out of very vague memories of his school years.
The images of the artist personified as soldier, uniformed student and priest come from performances he has made since 2015, in which he inhabits recreated hostile environments. This is the case in Hermit Reading, a small painting based on the performance Hermitage of 2021, where the artist wears a priest's uniform and reads Saint Augustine’s Confessions in a corner of a green room full of mud.
In Hermit, the same character appears multiple times: as a priest in the back, referencing the performance, and again as a body being lifted by two figures, also the priest, now dressed in school uniforms.
The architecture in Columnata and Patio reference Saint Marón School in Buenos Aires.
Dana Alessi (b. 1988). Lives and works in Buenos Aires. She works with painting, drawing, textile and murals. As a recognised fashion designer from the University of Buenos Aires, her path as a visual artist developed through attending to clinics and workshops with Diego Perrotta, Francisca Kweitel, Alejandra Roux and Diana Aisenberg.
In 2022 she won the Argentine Women Muralists Contest organized by Fundacion Andreani and The Embassy of France, and presented her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Architecture and Design of Buenos Aires.
This body of works, depicting mountains, appear across her hand-painted fabrics, murals, paintings and tapestries. By playfully moving from one discipline to another, she is able to experiment simultaneously with different points of view, scales and materials in compositions that attempt to replicate the movement of the gaze when it travels through a mountainous landscape.
The paper works Muy Cerca and Agosto, drawn in water based enamel, ink and pastel, show us mountains of the Patagonian Andes, Como II, Varenna and Oropa dorada are landscapes from her most recent trip to Italy . Todo lo que quedó está aqui en este paisaje (Everything that remained is here in this landscape), from 2019, is made with textile scraps sewed on to hand-dyed cotton fabric.
Stuart Evans and Manuela Barreiro
December 2022
Group show featuring works by Dana Alessi, Ignacio Chico and Juan Carlos Stakelman
Curated by Stuart Evans
November 2022