Renowned Argentine contemporary artist and Guggenheim scholar Liliana Porter will kick off a new retrospective exhibit called Travesías at the Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art (MALBA) on Saturday to showcase multiple pieces and highlights of a career spanning over 70 years. 

Travesías (Spanish for ‘journeys’) will feature her graphic art and collaborations with The New York Graphic Workshop (1964-1970) as well as artistic projects ranging from graphic art and painting to literature and storytelling. The exhibit will run until October 13. 

“I’m so happy to be here; it’s amazing to have a chance to bring these pieces to this museum, run by such a fantastic team,” said Porter at the media presentation last Thursday. The artist, who has lived in New York since the 1960s, called the exhibit “particularly meaningful,” as it will allow her to present her art in the city she was born in. 

Curated by former MALBA Artistic Director Agustín Pérez Rubio, the exhibit is organized in thematic spaces in order to show how Porter’s pieces from different decades relate to each other within the rooms. 

According to Pérez Rubio, the show was conceived to be “dynamic and current” while also allowing the public understand how the artist conceives her work from a “poetic and political perspective.”

“It’s not easy as a curator to try to encompass a career spanning more than 70 years in 600 square meters, especially with the lucidity, freshness, and youth of an artist who has been relevant ever since [she settled in] New York in 1964,” Pérez Rubio explained.

“The exhibition is alive, and as I said to Liliana, this is just one of the many retrospectives that lie ahead for her,” he added. 

On Friday, at 6 p.m., Porter will sit down with Pérez Rubio and MALBA’s current Artistic Director Rodrigo Moura in a public conversation at the museum’s auditorium prior to the opening. The event will be streamed live on the museum’s YouTube channel

A portrait of Liliana Porter

Born in 1941, Porter initially studied at the Manuel Belgrano National School of Fine Arts. She later took up printmaking at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico, where she moved in 1958, and later attended the Pratt Graphic Art Center after settling in New York in 1964. 

Together with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo, she founded the New York Graphic Workshop. In 1967, they formulated the concept of FANDSO (free assemblage, non-functional, disposable, serial object).

Throughout her seven-decade-long career, Porter worked with various artistic media, including printmaking, painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, theater, and public art. As her work expanded to performative arts through video and theater productions in the 2000s, the retrospective also includes performance pieces, which will be part of a dedicated program.

Porter has been featured in more than 450 exhibitions in 40 countries since she began showcasing her work in 1959. Her pieces have also become part of numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum, the MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, as well as the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, the Tate Modern in London, and the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, among many others.

Her most recent solo exhibits include appearances at the Museo de Barrio in New York, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, and the Luciana Brito Gallery in São Paulo.

Travesías — July 12 to October 13
Room 5, 2nd floor
MALBA – Av. Figueroa Alcorta 3415
Guided tours on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 5 p.m. (included in the museum’s admission ticket)