Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present La Migranta Blue Nipple, the gallery’s second solo exhibition in New York by Cecilia Vicuña. Born in Santiago, Chile and based in New York City, the visual artist, poet, filmmaker, and activist presents a series of new paintings, a selection of her “precario” sculptures, and a suite of drawings. The exhibition, encompassing all three floors of the gallery, also includes the first US presentation of Vicuña’s monumental quipu, NAUFraga (2022), since its premiere at the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as a new film based on unseen footage shot while participating in Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece. The works on display are informed conceptually by the principles of “Arte Precario,” or Precarious Art, the artist’s own autonomous aesthetic system that foregrounds ephemerality, intangibility, and that which disappears. As an artistic corollary to the instability and shakiness that abounds in our political climate, Vicuña’s precariousness allows her to grapple with issues ranging from immigration to environmental destruction. At the same time, her syncretic visual vocabulary prompts speculation on alternative possible futures, or worlds capable of realizing political, feminist, ecological, and conceptual reparation.
The title of the exhibition, La Migranta Blue Nipple, makes reference to Vicuña’s personal experience with migration and to the brutal treatment of migrant and immigrant communities that she has witnessed while living in this country. Visitors to the exhibition will first encounter a series of paintings completed this year that recreate, in oil on canvas, drawings Vicuña made in 1978 but which have since been lost or destroyed, existing only in the artist’s memory and in limited photographic documentation. In 1975, after having been in London in self-exile following the violent military coup d'etat in her homeland Santiago de Chile, Vicuña settled in Bogota, Colombia. Two years later, she traveled from Bogota to Rio de Janeiro, across the Amazon, to visit her cousin, where she encountered the sacred world and living rituals of the local Indigenous and mestizo Afro Brazilian peoples. In response to her journey, she made 30 drawings in chalk and pastel on brown wrapping paper. Many of these works contain references to Orixás––deities worshiped in the Yoruba religion which Vicuña learned of during her time crossing the Amazon––combined with popular culture images collected from her dreams, popular songs, common phrases, and other vernacular sources such as common insults used in her native Chile. Her new paintings bring these original drawings of hybrid Orixás back to life in forms that embody mermaids (Iemanjá), Pachamama (Incan earth mother / mother of space & time), Santa Bárbara (mother of the home), La música latinoamericana (goddess of Latin American music), Flora (goddess of fertility), and San Martin de Porres (patron saint of social justice, racial harmony, and mixed-race people), among many others.
One of the new paintings, La Migranta (2024), features a giant Vanessa Carye butterfly who stands among the dark waters of the Rio Grande and beneath whose wings migrants of all ages journey together. In the reimagined scene, Vicuña renders the love, compassion, and conditions for solidarity among migrants whose arrival in the US is often met with hatred and violence. In another, Iemanjá, blue nipple (2024), the artist makes reference to the Orixá goddess of love, the mother of the sea, life, the beginning of fertility, joy, happiness, and wild eroticism. Her blue eyes, nipples, and scales represent the sea breathing in and through her as she holds the stars in her hands, the cycles of nature and life swirling through her. In another work, San Martin de Porres (2024), Vicuña depicts the Peruvian saint as a Black man with an Afro wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. He holds a broom and is surrounded by street animals. Bringing together iconography of cultures and religions from Latin America, Vicuña embraces a syncretic painterly vocabulary, one where mono– and polytheistic religions are intertwined with Indigenous cosmology. What emerges is a series of fantastical beings and hybrid historical travelers whose compassion and understanding––as the artist playfully speculates––might guide the “migration” of humanity’s consciousness away from the supercharged individualism that is all pervasive in contemporary society.
The installation NAUfraga (2022), which occupies the gallery’s double height space, synthesizes two foundational aspects of Vicuña practice, the “quipu” and the “precario.” Vicuña’s quipus (translated as “knot” from Quechua) reimagine the ancient Andean system that recorded statistics and narratives through the knotting of colored thread. The traditional quipu held existential and social value for communities and represented a complex system of knowledge with symbolic and virtual dimensions. Addressing this larger paradigm, Vicuña constructs her quipus as poems in space. Her tactile representations of the relationship between the cosmological and earthly realms seek to describe a reality that does not conform to standard perception. Vicuña’s ongoing series of precarios (which she began in 1966) are anti-monumental sculptures composed of found material and often installed in a precarious manner that challenges Western notions of permanence and stasis. NAUfraga is a quipu composed of 83 precario objects, 40 dried plants/wood, and 36 fishnets/yute sac remnants suspended in space by thin white threads. Each hanging element is made of detritus collected in the Venetian lagoon, an homage to the ancient fishing tradition and fragility of nature. As Madeline Weisburg explains, “Taken from the Latin words navis (ship) and frangere (to break), NAUfraga suggests the exploitation of the Earth, which has caused Venice to slowly sink into the sea.”
In the lower level gallery, Vicuña will present a new film, Quipu Womb (2024), that brings together unseen footage shot in Athens, Greece, taken when she was participating in Documenta 14. At that exhibition, she installed the landmark monumental sculpture Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread Athens) (2017) and performed a series of public and private rituals throughout the landscape. Combining poetry, performance, sound, and the artist’s engagement with the natural and built environments, Vicuña’s film tells the story of the origin of Quipu Womb, which is intimately linked to the story of the “red thread,” or the story of women. The film links two original sources of mythology: Crete and the Andes. Vicuña’s rituals are offerings intended to restore the world’s wounded memory as a way of “turning around the waves of the system” currently leading us towards extermination.
La Migranta Blue Nipple invites reflection and contemplation through Vicuña’s multidimensional practice. The artist’s return to the spiritual universe of the Orixás offers a way to understand and perhaps offer hope for the future.
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