MUNTREF Collection

Curator: Hersilia Álvarez, Camila Feal, Amanda Nascimento, Cecilia Rabossi, Juliana Robles de la Pava.

Artists: Leila Alaoui, Patricia Araujo, Hugo Aveta, Christian Boltanski, Renata Espinoza Roa, Ivan Grilo, Patricia Hakim, Annemarie Heinrich, Voluspa Jarpa, Adriana Lestido, Carolina Magnin, Leo Nuñez, Cristina Piffer, Javier Plano, Víctor Rebuffo, Steve Roden, Paul Rosero Contreras, Mariano Sardón, Carlos Sessano, Clorindo Testa, Andrés Waissman.

The MUNTREF collection is a university collection focused on modern and contemporary art, presented for the first time in a curatorial narrative. A collection under construction, heterogeneous, conformed without an unequivocal criterion. Gathered from donations, acquisitions, vestiges of temporary exhibitions, BIENALSUR, the Braque Prize and the UNTREF Prize for Electronic Arts, it interweaves layers of meaning and works that establish a complex cosmography.

The exhibition, a possible story, reveals, on the one hand, the general dynamics of the processes of conformation of a collection and, on the other, appeals to two nuclei that show a dialogue between the poetic, political, social and historical imaginaries that are detached from each of the works. It focuses on transformations, historical processes, personal and collective memory, the questioning of archives, the uses of language, immigration, discussions on the environment, the search to make the immaterial visible and the relations between the visual and the textual in order to question the natural and social environment.

From a current perspective that interrogates the limits of its own present, En construcción proposes a dialogue between expressions of modernity -Annemarie Heinrich, Víctor Rebuffo and Carlos Sessano- and contemporary production that allows new debates to be activated and new problems to be extrapolated.

Two central axes constitute this story. In the first case, the poetics of the projection that question the margins of the natural and the urban with the works of Carolina Magnin, Patrícia Araujo, Annemarie Heinrich, Javier Plano and Leo Nuñez stand out. Meanwhile, in a second case, a dialogue unfolds that ranges from the resignifications of memory through memory and the questioning of archives to the explorations of a graphic potentiality that is presented in multiple uses and varied supports. The works of Ivan Grilo, Cristina Piffer, Renata Espinoza Roa, Víctor Rebuffo, Andrés Waissman, Hugo Aveta, Voluspa Jarpa, Paul Rosero Contreras, Mariano Sardón, Steve Roden and Christian Boltanski are articulated here. Finally, the works of Leila Alaoui, Patricia Hakim, Adriana Lestido, Carlos Sessano and Clorindo Testa point out the different paths in the construction of a collection.

Leila Alaoui

Crossings.

2013

Photography

60 x 90 cm

 

 

Carlos Sessano

The People’s Candidates

1963

Mixed technique, oil applied with a spatula and superimposed papers on the canvas.

200 x 160 cm

Donation

 

 

Chlorindo Testa

Construction

2004

Assemblage of wood and boxes

140 x 450 x 134 cm

DonationCollection Marion Eppinger

 

 

Patrícia Araujo

Resposta selvagem

2015-2016

Photography

50 x 70 cm each

 

 

Leo Nuñez

Cloudy

2016

Installation Micromapping on recycled electronics

70 x 150 x 130 cm

 

 

Javier Plano

Disturbances

2014

Video installation of 5 channels in loop

Variable dimensions

 

 

Carolina Magnin

Narbe

2017

Photographic Installation  printing on glass

170 x 600 cm

 

Annemarie Henry

Aerial vue of Rio (vista aérea de Río)

c.1950

photographer

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Henry

Andamus

1950

photographer

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Henry

Traces in the sand (Rastros en la arena)

1950

photographer

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Henry

Workers (Trabajadores)

1960

photographer

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Henry

River, Stone, Piles (Río, piedras, pilotes)

1937

photographer

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Henry

The cactus (El cactus)

1947

photographer

62 x 51,8 cm

 

Annemarie Henry

 Weeds in the sun, meadow grass  (Yuyos en la arena, cortaderas)

1953

photographer

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Henry

The fisherman  (El pescador)

s/f

photographer

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Henry

Puente Alsina

1940

photographer

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Henry

speech

1950

photographer

62 x 51,8 cm

 

Annemarie Heinrich

Lines

1939

Photography

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Heinrich

Untitled

1950

Photography

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Heinrich

Solitude

1946

Photography

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Heinrich

Untitled (from the series Vacationing in the city (Veraneando en la ciudad))

1960

 

Photography

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Heinrich

Tent roofs

1950

Photography

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Heinrich

Untitled (from the Muelles series)

n/a

Photography

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Annemarie Heinrich

The Italo

n/a

Photography

62 x 51,8 cm

 

 

Ivan Grilo

No one has ceased to exist

2017

Engraving on bronze

100 x 25 cm each

 

 

Renata Espinoza Roa

The soundtrack of my life

2017

Installation with serigraphy

Screenprints: 3 of 120 x 180 cm and 1 of 120 x 120 cm

 

 

Cristina Piffer

In collaboration with Félix Torres

300 Minutes

2017

Video installation

Variable dimensions

 

 

Andrés Waissman

Barahúnda

2015

Ink on rice paper in metal device and roll-up glass

46 x 250 cm

Acquisition

 

 

Hugo Aveta

When elephants fight…

2017

Video installation

Variable dimensions

 

 

Voluspa Jarpa

First person plural

2017

Installation

Variable dimensions

 

Paul Rosero Contreras

Ananganá (part of The Andes Pavilion)

2017

Video installation

Variable dimensions

 

 

Victor Rebuffo

The scaffold

1965

Xylography

20 x 55 cm

 

 

Victor Rebuffo

Subversion

1971

Xylography

54 x 61 cm

 

 

Victor Rebuffo

Manifestation

1935-1937

Drawing

5,7 x 9 cm

 

Victor Rebuffo

Repression

1935-1937

Drawing

7 x 3,4 cm

 

 

Victor Rebuffo

The rebellion

1953

Xylography

43 x 33 cm

 

Victor Rebuffo

Darkness

1947

Xylography

20 x 17 cm

 

 

Victor Rebuffo

Dock South

1976

Xylography

24 x 43 cm

 

 

Victor Rebuffo

The submerged villa

1969

Xylography

81 x 54 cm

 

 

Victor Rebuffo

Boquense Radiography

1955

Engraving

58 x 40 cm

 

 

 

Mariano Sardón

Sand Books

2003-2004

Interactive installation

Variable dimensions

 

Steve Roden

Cascade

2016

Serigraphy on paper

50 x 35 each cm

 

 

Christian Boltanski

Mysteries

2017

Sound video installation

Variable dimensions

 

 

Patricia Hakim

Untitled

2002

Mixed media

Printing on plastic, die-cutting

 

 

Adriana Lestido

Mother and daughter in Plaza de Mayo in the March for Life

1982

Photography

When we founded MUNTREF, with absolute intention we called it a museum because we had in mind the need for it to have its own collection, as a logical continuation of the task of democratizing culture and approaching new audiences that we had considered.

Collections are the private appropriation of works of art, regardless of whether there are collectors who try to get their works to the public through exhibitions. Faced with this, we were moved by the idea that this very young university in the Buenos Aires suburbs could have a collection that would increase the cultural heritage of the region.

The names that make it up, including some of the main local and foreign artists, are a new demonstration of what can be done dreaming high and with the will that a public institution in the South can act without complexes and be the interlocutor of the main museums in the world.

The curatorial skill of professors and students of the Master in Curatorship in Visual Arts, directed by Diana Wechsler, has allowed them to create a harmonic  tale that puts in value each one of these pieces that, to their aesthetic merit, add up to be part of the collective passion for the defense of the institution that characterizes those of us who build this university.

 

Aníbal Y. Jozami

Rector

UNTREF

Ten years ago at UNTREF we began our Master’s Degree in Curatorship in Visual Arts with a defined vocation for specifying a differentiated space in which curatorship was part of the research processes on diverse symbolic productions that operate in societies and different audiences. From the beginning, the fact that our university had a museum became one of the key pieces as one of the laboratory spaces, together with the Dr. Norberto Griffa Institute for Research in Art and Culture – IIAC, its Archive and the other research centers and programs that work in articulation.

The curatorial exercise carried out by the students Hersilia Álvarez, Camila Feal, Amanda Nascimento and Juliana Robles de la Pava, under the tutelage of Cecilia Rabossi, professor of the Master’s degree, is situated within this dynamic framework, between training and research.

It is a creative essay in which aesthetic perspectives and historical times cross in search of tracing some conceptual axes that allow us to think the UNTREF collection as a space “under construction”, surely the first of many more that will follow in time to contribute with these exercises to make the collection a space of thought.

 

Diana B. Wechsler

Director Art and Culture Department

UNTREF