In this exhibition of watercolors and video, Amadeo Azar (Mar del Plata, 1974) propels his work through a return to the interests and approaches of his early years as an artist. In recent times, Azar has been drawn to Argentine history as embodied in absurd anecdotes; to the history of his hometown, Mar del Plata, as a symptom-city of the country’s social fluctuations; and to the ways in which 20th-century visual languages were articulated with local realities.

In this exhibition, he pushes these interests toward autobiography, in an oblique way. There was a child growing up in a monotonous and boring wintertime Mar del Plata, who would immerse himself for hours in the images of encyclopedias that were common in middle-class households—“the Google of that time,” in Azar’s words. Reverberations of those illustrations appear in the small-scale watercolors in this deliberately intimate and quiet exhibition, conceived in dialogue with playwright Mariana Obersztern.

Each watercolor could be a staging of a daydream. References emerge to data found on the Google Trends website, the-shape-of-dreams.com, which tracks global users’ queries about the content of their dreams. There are also references to the Mundaneum, a visionary project developed in the early decades of the 20th century to gather all the world’s information and organize it according to a universal decimal system. The landscape of Route 2, which connects Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata—traveled countless times by Azar, and by most residents of Buenos Aires—appears through distorted frames. In a central piece, there are watercolors based on astrolabes mounted on logs, resonating with the rustic chalet aesthetic of European influence that was common in Mar del Plata and other Argentine vacation spots.

Amadeo Azar (1972) founded and directed the alternative art space MOTP in Mar del Plata in the 2000s. He has held more than fifteen solo exhibitions, among which stand out the installation project at Fundación Andreani in 2023 and his exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Salta in 2018.

His participation in group exhibitions is extensive and international, including invitations to the Trabucco Prize 2024 at Fundación OSDE; Del cielo a casa at MALBA, 2023; Una posmodernidad periférica at Fundación Federico Jorge Klemm, 2019; the Braque Prize at MUNTREF, 2017; and Open Sessions at The Drawing Center, New York, 2015. Azar has received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (Argentina), The Fountainhead Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, among others. In 2025, he will participate in the Est-Nord-Est residency in Quebec, Canada. In addition to his visual work, Azar is a member of the experimental music band TBF. His work is part of collections such as the Phoenix Art Museum; Cleveland Clinic, Cincinnati; Related Group/Pérez Collection, Miami; Deutsche Bank Collection, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rosario; Fundación FJ Klemm; the National Endowment for the Arts (Argentina); Banco Supervielle; and Fundación Banco Nación, among others.