Alejandra Fenochio (1962, lives and works in Buenos Aires) has had a personal and distinctive path as an artist. In the late 80s and early 90s she was an active participant in the cultural underground scene that sprung to life in Buenos Aires’ night clubs after Argentina emerged from years of military dictatorships. She befriended other artists, dancers, transexual performers and painted large scale portraits of them, often posing nude. Despite being over thirty years old, these works reverberate with a very current feeling.

In the mid-nineties she moved to the riverside working class neighborhood of La Boca in Buenos Aires, where she raised her children and became a community activist, focusing her prolific painting on portraying the people and landscapes surrounding her, while also working as studio assistant for Leon Ferrari, Argentina’s most prominent politically engaged artist (he won the 2007 Venice Biennial Golden Lion Award). Fenochio chose to focus her work on her engagement with her immediate community. Although she participated in several exhibitions, she did not seek gallery representation nor presence in the international art scene.

In 2021 she presented a large solo show in Buenos Aires in the context of the BienalSur Biennial, which led to the discovery of her skillful, powerful paintings by an amazed larger audience, much attention from the press and being awarded a major national prize. At Armory 2022 we presented her work for the first time outside of Argentina, bringing some of her large nude portraits from the nineties as well as a group of small paintings depicting the shores of local rivers, the native plants growing at their edge, nature battling human-made pollution. These works’ stretcher bars have been hand-made by the artist, their deliberately handcrafted, slightly irregular characteristics add a layer of meaning representative of the approach this artist has had with her own life.