Lotty Rosenfeld

NoguerasBlanchard is pleased to announce the exhibition Acciones de Arte by Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld born in Santiago de Chile in 1943. Following a presentation by Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger, this is the second in a series of exhibitions in the gallery space in Barcelona focusing on works produced in the seventies and eighties by Latin American women artists. Here, the exhibition centres on a selection of photographs and videos that illustrate Rosenfeld’s pioneering ‘action’ works from the early eighties Acciones de Arte (1979-present).

Lotty Rosenfeld reached her creative maturity under the weight of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1989) performing artistic interventions in public spaces through elements that symbolically challenged the political status-quo and defied institutional rigidity.

Rosenfeld’s role as an artist is essentially performative and the documenting of her ‘actions’ is crucial as it has allowed her to develop mutations, variations, metamorphosis around a central theme. The signs employed to organize circulation – of goods, subjects, policies, violence – are a fundamental element in her artistic practice. Since Rosenfeld’s first intervention on the white dividing lines that separate traffic lanes on the streets of Santiago in 1979, the artist sought to literally and symbollically deconstruct the natural adherence to the signs of hegemonic power by leading the pedestrian to critically question an experience that kept him captive in everyday reality. This apparently simple visual incursion formed the basis of an artistic discourse in a dictatorship where any gesture or ordinary event that visually disrupted the official portrayal of reality would be read as a disobeying act. A concept that sought out the street precisely when public space was occupied by the violent, invasive and excluding military regime, Rosenfeld’s work implied an aesthetic and political choice.

The regular and obsessive repetition of her emblematic cross sign (+) has colonized public spaces in a gesture that Rosenfeld conceives as rebellious street art. The construction of this sign and its expansion initiated a new aesthetic and theoretical framework as far as it was established as a direct confrontation to the hegemonic spaces of power, a “critical weapon”. Drawing a line perpendicular to the line used world wide to divide streets and avenues Rosenfeld questions the rigidity and the orientation of the chosen path, and interprets this action as an act of contempt that says NO to a pre-ordained course of travel.

Along with video documentation of her performances in the late ’70s and early ’80s, three photographs of actions in Documenta in Kassel in 2012 are shown, as well as in Berlin and San Juan de Puerto Rico.

Lotty Rosenfeld (Santiago, 1943) lives and works in Santiago, Chile. She studied at the School of Applied Arts of the University of Chile. In the early 70s her artistic production was based on traditional techniques, such as etching, with which she won numerous awards. Together with other artists, she became member of C.A.D.A. (Colectivo Acciones De Arte) with whom she traveled extensively and obtained a grant from the Ford Foundation to promote their body of work. From the mid 80’s she started to focus on her work outside of the collective and began making interventions in public spaces in politically charged locations. Among the most significant: 1982 in front of the White House, Washington; 1983 Border Chile / Argentina and the Allied Checkpoint in Berlin; 1985 against the Revolution Palace in Havana; 1994 at the Capitol in San Juan, Puerto Rico; 2007 Documenta in Kassel, among many other places. Her work is in numerous public collections including the Tate Gallery (London) and the Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid). Lotty Rosenfeld will represent Chile at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

With many thanks to Espai Visor, Valencia.