Fernanda Laguna is probably the artist in her generation who has achieved the status of a myth in the strongest way. As the force behind the gallery and publishing project Belleza y Felicidad (Beauty and Happiness), as the painter heiress to the light art of the nineties (Translator´s note: a highly influential development within the local art scene), as a poet and writer, as the promoter of art workshops and later an art oriented high school in Villa Fiorito (TN: a shanty town in the outskirts of Buenos Aires), she practices a total fusion of her work, her life and her ideas…

Inés Katzenstein
(Curator, Director of the Art Program at Universidad Di Tella, Buenos Aires)
Fernanda Laguna, Central desde los márgenes (Central From the Margins)
Otra Parte Magazine, Winter 2013, Buenos Aires

Fernanda Laguna´s status as a true cult artist comes not only from her distinctive visual art production but also from her bold novels and poems —which have been translated into English and published in the USA— and for having been involved in the creation of several alternative organizations, which were effectively part of her art practice. In 2001 Laguna co-founded the now legendary artist-run gallery “Belleza y Felicidad” (Beauty and Happiness), which for many years was the cauldron of emerging art and literature in Buenos Aires. She then moved the gallery to a shantytown in the outskirts of the city, where over a decade it evolved into a successful education program for disadvantaged youth.

Laguna’s work is intersected by several recurring themes: erotic desire expressed from a woman’s standpoint; the playful and the irrational; references to and appropriation of local every-day popular handcrafts and iconography yet at the same time an interest in pictorial traditions such as geometric abstraction or metaphysical painting. Many of her works ask the viewer to value simple, inexpensive materials and spontaneous craftsmanship, which are the basis of much of her poetics.

This exhibition also includes paintings from her Mimbres (Wicker) series and from Abstract Shapes That Look Like Something, which present black shapes set against a wide metaphysical horizon which act like humans. The cut-out shapes and slashes on the surfaces of the canvases are characteristic of these works, a reminder that the actual world and social sphere always crosses through her apparently dreamlike paintings. Central to this show are a series of home-made videos which are guided tours to her own work. They are housed in a paper castle.

Later this year Fernanda Laguna will participate in an exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in the context of LA/LA Pacific Standard Time. She has participated in the 2013 edition of the Mercosul Biennial, Brazil and the 2014 Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador. Her works are in the collections of Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (MAMBA); Supervielle Bank Foundation, Buenos Aires; Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, New York; The Related Group, Miami and in many important private collections. She was included in the Best of 2012 list in Artforum magazine, being described as undoubtedly one of the most interesting visual artists in the Americas.