Cecilia Vicuña, from London to New York
From 27 May to 5 September 2022, the Guggenheim Museum in New York presents "Spin Spin Triangulene", an exhibition of the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948), who was recently commissioned by the Tate Modern to create a major art installation.
Source: Guggenheim Museum, New York / Tate Modern, London · Image: Cecilia Vicuña, “Autobiografía” (Autobiography) (detail), 1971. Oil on canvas, 59,7 x 64,1 cm. © Cecilia Vicuña.
It has been a successful two months for Cecilia Vicuña.
Following the announcement on 30 March that the Tate Modern would commission the Chilean artist to create its annual art installation for the Turbine Hall, less than two months later the Guggenheim Museum in New York is opening "Spin Spin Triangulene", an exhibition that traces more than half a century of the artist's career.
Born in 1948 in Santiago de Chile, Vicuña was forced into exile after Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état against Salvador Allende. Since then, as Tate Modern explained in announcing the commission for Turbine Hall, "this sense of impermanence, and a desire to preserve and pay tribute to the country’s indigenous history and culture have characterised her career, spanning half a century. Vicuña’s ephemeral and environmentally conscious work combines the tactile ritual of weaving with assemblage, poetry, performance, and painting."
This multidisciplinary approach of Vicuña's is reflected in the Guggenheim exhibition, which includes paintings, works on paper, textiles, films, a Quipu installation created specifically for the exhibition, and even a performance of a "living" Quipu, commissioned by the museum's Latin American Circle. These quipus are, as the Guggenheim Museum describes them, "soft sculptures made of suspended strands of knotted and unspun wool sometimes combined with found objects. The khipu (knot) was knotting made of colored threads to convey complex narrative and numerical information, a system created in the Andes in South America and later abolished by European colonizers. Vicuña reimagines her Quipus as a poetic response against cultural, ecological, and economic disparities."
The exhibition also includes "Palabrarmas" (“word weapons”), poems or riddles created through textiles, film and works on paper, and charged with a message of political or social commitment.

Read the full article