At MUDEC in Milan, the exhibition of the winner of the Artist of the Year 2023 award, La Chola Poblete

From Sept. 13 to Oct. 2024, MUDEC in Milan presents with Deutsche Bank and in collaboration with 24 ORE Cultura the exhibition Guaymallén by Argentine artist La Chola Poblete (Mendoza, 1989), winner in 2023 of the prestigious international Artist of the Year award that the Bank dedicates to contemporary art, and recently awarded a special mention for her contribution to the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. The exhibition is curated by Britta Färber, Global Head of Art & Culture at Deutsche Bank. With the Guaymallén project, Chola Poblete pays homage to her indigenous origins andqueer identity.

Taking its name from her hometown in northernArgentina, Mendoza, in the foothills of the Andes, the exhibition blends the artist’s life, roots, experience, and vision into a personal and forthright narrative filled with beauty, cruelty, and rebellion. An artist, performer and LGBTQ+ rights activist, in her work La Chola Poblete critically examines the consequences of colonialism and white supremacy in Argentina. Through different media such as sculpture, painting, performance, drawing, watercolor, and photography, she reflects on her indigenous and queer roots and opposes the stereotyping and exoticization of indigenous peoples by confronting the historical role of women, transvestites, and transgender people, expressions of femininity targeted or marginalized by religious and patriarchal power structures. Associated with these themes is a broader reflection concerning the position of the artist in the art world in relation to her identity (trans, indigenous) and the role of Western institutions in determining the canons of what we call “art.”

For Guaymallén, the artist has designed a space that refers to the Andean Baroque architectural style, redesigning the rooms of Mudec Photo as an extraordinary contemporary “cathedral of design,” a place of intense colors ranging from red to sulfur yellow, composed of rooms similar to the aisles of a church. The exhibition presents a series of never-before-seen works made with a very special technique, which involves baking bread dough sculptures, a material that enjoys a life of its own and is transformed into something new, escaping the artist’s control. Hence the collaboration with Panificio Davide Longoni activated for the Italian leg of the Guaymallén exhibition. In the historic Milanese bakery, La Chola created two life-size anthropomorphic sculptures and a series of masks, thus establishing a parallelism between the ritual of baking and that of artistic creation.

The work Maria & papas lays is a hybrid figure that refers to sanctity and mixes Catholicism, indigenous spirituality and queer ideology. In the cross-shaped installation Sin tìtulo, La Chola combines the rigid nature of the metal spear with the poetic and fluid essence of watercolors, along with the malleability of bread, associated with warmth and nourishment. The exhibition also features a series of large-scale watercolors. For the artist, the processes of watercolor painting and bread baking are similar. States La Chola Poblete, “When I make a bread mask or work with molten watercolor, both follow an irreversible path. On the one hand, the dough takes on different shades of color depending on how long it stays in the oven, changing shape, rising, cracking and burning. Similarly, watercolor distorts the pattern, blending with other stains and creating new shapes. I feel that these materials have a performative quality, embodying mutability and flux.” The exhibition also includes a new series of three photographic works in which La Chola interprets the main character, drawing inspiration on the one hand from figures of mythology, such as the Capitoline she-wolf in the work La Loba, and on the other hand from Christian iconography, as in La Virgen de la leche, who feeds her milk into the mouth of a Mormon man, a clear reference to the exploitation brought by colonialism. The third subject, printed on a T-shirt, shows an extreme situation featuring La Chola herself as she is being skinned.

After its inauguration at PalaisPopulaire in Berlin, the Artist of the Year initiative returns to MUDEC in Milan, renewing the collaboration between Deutsche Bank and 24 ORE Cultura that began in 2022. The partnership stems from a shared interest in contemporary languages and the intent to present to the Italian public international artists who stand out for the originality of their research and the creativity of their work. The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive cultural program, conceived by 24 Ore Cultura with the support of the Deutsche Bank Italia Foundation; on Friday, September 13, at 5 p.m., artist La Chola will hold an Artist Talk at the MUDEC Auditorium, in which he will discuss his work and his experience between art and activism, dialoguing with curator Britta Färber. Thanks to the collaboration with Deutsche Bank for the Artist of the Year project, MUDEC further confirms its role as a space devoted to experimentation and the most innovative languages, where the thought and practices of some of the most important artists on the contemporary scene-such as Maxwell Alexandre, Conny Maier, Zhang Xu Zhan and LuYang-have found maximum expression. After Wangechi Mutu (2010), Yto Barrada (2011), Roman Ondàk (2012), Imran Qureshi (2013), Victor Man (2014), Koki Tanaka (2015), Basim Magdy (2016), Kemang Wa Lehulere (2017), Caline Aoun (2018-2019), Maxwell Alexandre, Conny Maier and Zhang Xu Zhan (biennium 2020 - 2021), Lu Yang (2022), and La Chola Poblete (2023), the 2024 “Artist of the Year” is Rohini Devasher.

“The hallmark of Deutsche Bank’s commitment to the world of art has always been its ability to identify the expressions that best represent the present and to make them accessible to an ever wider audience. We are pleased to renew our collaboration with the City of Milan and 24 ORE Cultura and to bring the Artist of the Year project to MUDEC for the third year in a row, once again with an artist who is able to stand out for the strength of her messages,” said Roberto Parazzini, Deutsche Bank’s Chief Country Officer in Italy.

“We are happy to renew our collaboration with Deutsche Bank for this prestigious international award that sees us close in promoting art as a fundamental tool for interpreting and questioning our present. In particular, La Chola Poblete’s exhibition leads us to reflect on important issues such as rights, inclusion, gender issues, and the encounter between different cultures, reflecting the museum’s mission: a space for dialogue and exchange on contemporary issues through the voices of artists from around the world,” says Federico Silvestri, CEO of 24 ORE Cultura.

Notes about the artist

Chola Poblete is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Buenos Aires. She has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in Argentina and abroad. Solo exhibitions include Ejercicios del llanto at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires (2022), curated by Victoria Noorthoorn, director of the museum, who proposed La Chola Poblete to the Deutsche Bank Global Art Advisory Council as Artist of the Year 2023. From the Deutsche Bank award came the exhibition Guaymallén, presented first at the Palais Populaire in Berlin (2023) and then at MUDEC in Milan (2024). His solo exhibitions were held at the Kunsthalle in Lisbon (2023), Pasto Gallery in Buenos Aires (2021), and Museo Carlos Alonso in Mendoza (2019); he participated in several group shows at Galleria POGGI in Cavaillon, France (2022), ISLAA Institute of Studies on Latin American Arts in New York (2022), Centro Internacional Das Artes José de Guimarães in Lisbon (2022); Museo Moderno de Buenos Aires (2021). In 2024 he exhibited at the 60th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, entitled Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa receiving a special mention from the jury. In 2023 he participates in the 22nd International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil in São Paulo and in 2024 he is present at Art Basel with a dedicated booth.

Practical information

Hours: Monday 2:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.; Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday 9:30 a.m. - 7:30 p.m.; Thursday, Saturday 9:30 a.m. - 10:30 p.m.

Free admission

At MUDEC in Milan, the exhibition of the winner of the Artist of the Year 2023 award, La Chola Poblete

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.