Cecilia Vicuña’s observe of recollecting — in each senses of gathering and remembering — doubles as an act of look after that which era, loss, and neglect have obscured, although not completely erased. At Lehmann Maupin, this course of turns inward, extending her expansive observe of retrieval to fragments of her personal inventive previous. A collection of latest oil work recreate drawings Vicuña made in 1978 that at the moment are misplaced or destroyed, surviving solely in her reminiscence and thru a small variety of pictures. These unique drawings had been created after Vicuña — then residing in Bogotá, Colombia, following her self-exile after Pinochet’s coup — launched into a two-month journey throughout the Amazon to Rio de Janeiro. Alongside the way in which, she encountered Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities who provided hospitality and shared sacred rituals. These experiences impressed her syncretic depictions of Orixás, or Yoruba deities that information and shield, which incorporate dreamlike imagery drawn from vernacular songs, native flora, and fragments of non-public reminiscence.
Created earlier this yr, Vicuña’s work reanimate the imagery and reminiscence of those misplaced hybrid divinities whereas increasing her pantheon with completely new figures, every a repository of symbols rendered in shiny pastels. “Santa Bárbara” (2024) is topped with a cluster of homes, her type reimagined as a panorama of hills and steep slopes, lined with colourful neighborhoods like these Vicuña encountered in Northeast Brazil. In “La música latinoamericana” (2024), one other portrait, Vicuña deifies Latin music, reworking devices into anthropomorphic figures, their curves and shapes changing into extensions of the human physique.
The exhibition additionally options the primary United States presentation of Cecilia Vicuña’s monumental quipu, “NAUfraga” (2022), following its premiere on the 59th Venice Biennale. As soon as used as an Andean ancestral record-keeping machine of knotted threads, the quipu is reimagined by Vicuña as an immersive “poem in space,” in response to the press launch, or a rhythmic cascade of shells, rocks, dried crops, and fragments of nets, jutes, and plastics gathered from the Venetian lagoon. For the primary time, guests can stroll by means of “NAUfraga,” an expertise akin to weaving by means of a shifting internet of suspended sea wrack, the place pure particles meets human-made refuse.
Left: Cecilia Vicuña, “Santa Bárbara” (2024), oil on canvas, 69 x 28 x 1 inches (175.3 x 71.1 x 2.5 cm); proper: Cecilia Vicuña, “La música latinoamericana” (2024), oil on canvas, 69 x 28 x 1 inches (175.3 x 71.1 x 2.5 cm) (each © 2024 Cecilia Vicuña/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; photograph by Daniel Kukla; courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London)
With “A Prayer for the Rebirth of Peace in the All Lands” (2024), Vicuña continues her precarios (1966–) collection, reworking pure and inorganic particles into small-scale, lyrical sculptures. Organized throughout an expansive wall like relics of our throwaway tradition, the sculptures are framed by a loosely scribbled chalk prayer about ecological precarity and political uncertainty: “We are at war with ourselves, with each other, and with the land.” The sculptures are delicately sure collectively in off-kilter varieties that really feel each precarious and playfully charismatic — amongst them, a steel coil tethered to a stone by a brittle twig, netting enveloping plastic and shell shards, and a withered sprig extending like an olive department.
The work continues with a big piece of bark that rests on the ground, topped with smaller picket fragments; guests are invited to put in writing single-word messages of peace, friendship, and respect in chalk throughout its surfaces. The clumsily layered languages — a prayer spoken throughout divides — analogize the tenuous but very important battle for peace in a recent second riddled with world battle. It means that, like these fragile assemblages, peace calls for care, stability, and the resolve to carry collectively what may in any other case disintegrate.
Past tending to that which disappears, Vicuña’s work is a reminder that what’s misplaced or discarded — whether or not supplies, histories, or traditions getting ready to vanishing — will be reimagined, underscoring that resilience typically begins with recognizing worth the place others see waste.
Set up view of Cecilia Vicuña, “Prayer for the Rebirth of Peace in All Lands” (2024) (photograph Clara Maria Apostolatos/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Cecilia Vicuña, “Prayer for the Rebirth of Peace in All Lands” (2024) (photograph Clara Maria Apostolatos/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Cecilia Vicuña, La Migranta Blue Nipple (each © 2024 Cecilia Vicuña/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; photograph by Daniel Kukla; courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London)
Set up view of “NAUfraga” (2022), blended media, fishnets with 161 hanging objects (83 Precario objects, 40 dried crops/wooden, 36 fishnets/yute sac items), 19 7/10 x 39 2/5 x 226 2/5 inches (6 x 12 x 69 m) (photograph Clara Maria Apostolatos/Hyperallergic)
Cecilia Vicuña: La Migranta Blue Nipple continues at Lehmann Maupin (501 West twenty fourth Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan) by means of January 11, 2025. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
