Claudia Fontes is a visual artist who explores through her actions, objects and research the poetic space and alternative modes of perception of culture, nature, history and society that emerge from processes of decolonisation, be they personal, interpersonal, or social.

Born in Argentina, she has been based in England for the past 10 years. She studied arts at the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón in Buenos Aires and Art History at Buenos Aires University. She was awarded grants to develop her practice at Taller de Barracas in Buenos Aires and to be a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where she worked under the advice of Richard Deacon, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Joan Jonas, amongst others.
She has been showing her work since 1992, with solo exhibitions at I.C.I. (Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana), Buenos Aires Modern Art Museum (MAMbA), Luisa Pedrouzo Art Gallery and at Ignacio Liprandi Arte Contemporáneo. Her work could be seen in the Frieze Sculpture Park 2011 in London, and at The Wordly House, in Documenta 13, Kassel, 2012. She represented Argentina at the 57 Venice Biennale in 2017.

Her work is featured in the collections of MALBA (Museum for Latin American Art), MAMbA (Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art) and MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art Rosario), and in private collections in Argentina, Europe and U.S.A.
One of the winners of the Parque de la Memoria Award in 1999, her piece Reconstruction of Pablo Míguez’ portrait can be seen on the waters of the Río de la Plata in Buenos Aires, as part of the memorial park built in homage to the disappeared in Argentina.

In parallel to her artistic practice, she has spearheaded the creation of several artists’ networks of cooperation, and has generated spaces for the development of critical thought, particularly in relation to artist-led culture. Amongst them was TRAMA, a platform of cooperation amongst artists that became a strong point of reference for DIY, self-organised visual artists culture both locally and internationally. Since 2013, she directs The Appreciation Society, a non-for-profit company based in England for the production of collective artistic projects worldwide, involving communities left out from the globalised art scene. She took part in the São Paulo Biennial in 2018 both as an artist and as a curator.