Silvia Gurfein (Buenos Aires, 1959) develops a pictorial practice grounded in fundamental questions about painting. Her work can be read as an extended conversation in which the evocation of an absent image—a ghost that eludes all fixation—coexists with an attention to remnants and vestiges displaced within the history of the medium. In this constant movement, the canvas becomes a surface of inscription: accumulations of oil, pigments, and impasto that seem to retain the trace of an absent body. Painting thus emerges as an open-ended operation, shaped by questions around perception, memory, and materiality.

During the “pan-period”—a term the artist uses to describe the time initiated by the pandemic in 2020—she developed a body of work that both condenses and reconfigures her trajectory while capturing a shared emotional climate. In these paintings, procedures typically considered secondary—sanding, blurring, sfumato, priming, the reverse of the support, remnants of the palette—are brought to the forefront, acquiring the status of image. At the same time, she reactivates materials from earlier series such as Huesos, Barro sublimado, and Astilla, estrella, reintroducing leftover oil paint into new compositions and proposing a continuous circulation of matter and time.

In recent years, she has reinforced her institutional presence with the solo exhibition Un cuerpo extraño en el ojo (2023) at Galería Nora Fisch and her participation in Intermitencias, destellos y continuidades (2024–2025), a two-person exhibition with Agustín Riganelli presented at Museo Larreta and Museo Sívori. In 2024, she presented El viaje vertical. In 2025, she published Antena (FAN ediciones), a book that brings together works produced during the pandemic and operates as a conceptual extension of her pictorial research, focusing on what usually remains in the background of the painting process.

In parallel, she has consolidated her curatorial practice through projects such as Fractura expuesta (2025–2026) at ArtHaus, where she explores intimacy as a site of tension and symbolic construction.

In 1999, she attended the workshops of Tulio de Sagastizábal. In 2010, she founded El texto de la obra, a writing workshop for artists that she has taught at various institutions in Argentina and Brazil. Since 2015, she has also worked as a curator, developing exhibition concepts, display strategies, and critical writing.

Her distinctions include the Konex Award (2022), her selection for the Trabucco Painting Prize (2022), and the 8M Acquisition Prize from the Ministry of Culture of Argentina (2022). Previously, she received the First Prize in Painting at the National Visual Arts Salon (2019), the First Prize in Painting from the Central Bank of Argentina (2019), and the Federico Jorge Klemm Prize (2011), among others.

She has held solo exhibitions in Buenos Aires and São Paulo and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Argentina and internationally. Her work is included in public and private collections in Argentina and abroad.

She lives and works in Buenos Aires.