Cecilia Vicuña
The 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, curated by Cecilia Alemani, was titled The Milk of Dreams, drawing its name from British-Mexican Surrealist Leonora Carrington’s eponymous book. The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement went to Cecilia Vicuña, whose 1977 Bendígame Mamita was quite literally the poster work for the world’s oldest and most prestigious art festival. VAULT looks at the life and art of the groundbreaking, multi-disciplinary artist.
Image credit: Cecilia Vicuña, Obstructing the Doors is Dangerous and Causes Delays, 1972/2023, oil on canvas, 101.6 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels © Cecilia Vicuna. ARS/ Copyright Agency, 2024
Entering her late 70s, Cecilia Vicuña was born as Surrealism reached its zenith – roughly at its midpoint, if we take the dates generally accepted to define the movement. Indeed, she was born at a time when the social activist spirit of the avant-garde in general, and Surrealism in particular, was at its most energised – between the world wars and during the rise of authoritarianism in Europe. The decade of her birth, the 1940s, was the decade Surrealism looked outside its traditional epicentres of Paris and New York and embraced Latin America and pre-Columbian mythologies, or vice versa. In 1940, the fourth International Exhibition of Surrealism was staged in Mexico City, featuring the work of both Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. By halfway through the decade, the city was home to an active circle of European emigrés fleeing the Nazis, including Antonin Artaud, Benjamin Péret and the ‘three witches’ – Leonora Carrington, Kati Horna and Remedios Varo.
Further south, Vicuña was born in 1948 into a family of artists and writers in Santiago de Chile. After the military coup against then-President Salvador Allende in 1973, she went into self-exile. Initially going to London and cofounding Artists for Democracy in 1974, she now splits her time between New York and her homeland. A surrealist in the most fundamental senses – literary, imaginative, nostalgic, socially engaged – Vicuña is a poet, artist, activist and filmmaker.
Her work is noted for its efforts to decolonise the oil tradition and reclaim the ancient, Indigenous knowledges of her homeland. In the mid-1960s, she coined the term ‘Arte Precario’ in reference to a new, independent, non-colonised category ... Subscribe to read all articles in full
