The thousand ways of being Marcia Schvartz

Exasperated, in her self-portrait “Let me paint” Marcia Schvartz He screams at the world to stop. Stacks and stacks of invoices from AySA, Edesur or Metrogas suffocate her and her color palette. The work, which currently hangs from the ceiling on the highest floor of W-gallerywas made by the artist last year and It is exhibited to the public for the first time in the context of the exhibition I am others, that encompasses more than 40 years of his career and almost – if not all – its artistic facets. Until September 14, it will occupy the entire enormous space located in San Telmo.

“We work with Roberto Amigo and We organize the exhibition by theme. I am others seeks to show all the Marcias, from different periods and disciplines,” suggests the current co-director of the gallery, Federico Curutchet, who, together with Schvartz, welcomes Viva for a tour around the sample. Pieces from the 80s that the artist did upon returning to the country, after exile in Barcelona during the dictatorship, They are interspersed with more recent ones in the different rooms.

A little further back in the same room as the aforementioned self-portrait is “Boquita, el origin del mal.” Faithful to anti style establishment by the artist, this 2019 installation parody of the world of footballespecially the barrabravas as vehicles – or tools – of politics in the 90s.

The protagonist of the scene is a grotesque barrabrava who masturbates naked in bed while looking at magazines with women with tits and listen to the same soccer game over and over again from a scratched television that he manipulates with a broomstick. Mauricio Macri, whose first approach to political power was the management of the Boca Juniors Athletic Club, appears in photos that he has hanging like virgins on the wall of his room. Accumulated around there are rolls of toilet paper, used condoms, boxes with drugs, a stone of pressed joint, an ashtray about to overflow and a large number of bottles.

Just a few steps away is “Preparing for arteva”, where he painted on a cardboard a woman looking at herself in the mirror as if screaming, with an irritated face, perhaps due to the excess of products of unknown origin that she some cheeky brushstrokes they give away, they are wearing. Posters of advertising models are interspersed in this bathroom with bills.

In tune with this satire of the art worldthere’s “Beauty & Arts,” where another woman gets her hands and feet done at a hair salon while reading gossip about Argentine high society figures in magazines Schvartz took from his eye doctor’s office. Thus, the character hopes that a chaotic pile of bleach and hair will become the desired blonde hair of a stunning tigress.

“This work reflects the panorama of evil criticism or a certain sector of cultural journalism converted into a world of business and public relations, which has nothing to do with mine,” he says.

Despite the fact that being honest and risky has cost her “a lot of trouble,” according to her account, and that several artistic spaces – especially for commercial purposes – at different times in her career have refused to exhibit her works, Fortunately, nothing altered his principles. Or his way of turning them into that fresh, cheeky and rocking art, which remains eternally young. The one who laughs out loud at the whims of power and who thus went around the world, going through many biennials and international exhibitions.

“In my portraits the characters are always melancholic, but I don’t manage it,” he says, while walking through the ground floor of the exhibition that brings together his portraits from different periods. In those he did recently, which are shown here for the first time, the paintings are familiaryoung students from his classes and others from the Manuel Belgrano Art School who visited the institution when it was taken over by students.

The emotional relationship with each one of them, she says, is what makes her paint them. “I don’t like working with professional models, nothing happens to me with that”he says, “I like when you create something with the person, when they talk about painting, you prime a mate or they prime it and they are not indifferent, but present and super committed to what they are doing.”

It is a week afternoon and so far on the tour she has already been stopped more than three times by excited visitors to greet her and ask her about the pieces. “People are so loving,” she exclaims. In the basement of the headquarters there is works that have more to do with nature. Ceramics with bright glazes, which he made during his time living in Tigre, and other more opaque and earthy ones inspired by the northern landscape.

The north is also reflected in a series of silky cacti that he made with cottonwhere velvety spiders walk and in which seduced butterflies enter and settle. The cacti experience, even on this floor, their own passionate love stories: they kiss with tongue under the moonlight on mystical and abysmal scenarios where time seems stopped.

The materials he used defy canonicity: a more nocturnal north is evoked in paintings made with wool, which he dyed and glued with poxiran, mud, earth and logs that he brought in boxes from these territories.

There are works in every corner of the gallery, even on the mezzanines and camouflaged with the plants in the patio. Crossing this, a smaller room with an archive displays, among other records, a video where she and her sister play with one of her sculptures in the Abasto basic unit in ’83.

There you can see how they got inside the doll called “The Queen of Bambo” to dance and sing with the people at snack time, as they also did with the remembered “Doña Concha”; that It now belongs to the collection of the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid.