Silvia Gurfein’s work is an exploration of the language and the practice of painting understood as an endeavor which reflects not only on seeing but also on time, on presences and absences, what is lasting and what is ephemeral. “Painting contains time, it contains history in its DNA”, Gurfein affirms. For many years she has collected the fragments of oil paint remaining after each day of work at her studio. Those fragments now dried and stone-like re-enter her most recent paintings as accents, as fulcrum, points from where lines depart and arrive. Also as elements with which she constructs collages on paper, hers is a poetics of the residue, the remainder.

The surfaces of her paintings are always smooth and flat, yet they are built by many layers of colors which have been applied in washes of oil paint, sanded, caressed. There is a tension between their extreme flatness, their porcelain-like finish and the subtle depth and spatial vibrations which are the result of her working process. In her most recent paintings these surfaces are the container for dancing lines which are meant to record her movements, an extension of her nervous system finding grace in a similar way as calligraphy does.

Gurfein (born in Buenos Aires, 1959) has received some of the main art awards in Argentina, among them the First Prize from the Klemm Foundation, the Banco Central Award, and in 2022 she was recipient of one of the Konex Awards to the most relevant figures in the Visual Arts in the country. She also has a background in performing arts and is a writer, she has created an influential workshop on writing for artists.