The Forgotten Exhibition and a Reading of Four Chilean Artists

A History of Interruptions, Discoveries and Revisions

The history of art is also the history of exhibitions and the institutions that promote and receive them. This is precisely the line explored in La exposición olvidada y una lectura a cuatro artistas chilenos (The Forgotten Exhibition and a Reading of Four Chilean Artists), which brings two exhibitions that have traveled different paths together.

On the one hand, it revives Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano (Toward a Profile of Latin American Art), an exhibition consisting of over one hundred heliographs by 68 artists, organized by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) and set to be held at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Chile in 1973, but canceled due to the coup d’état that overthrew Salvador Allende’s government. It was relegated to the Museum’s storage and confined there for decades before it could be appreciated at last, thanks to the recovery and investigation carried out by curators Mariana Marchesi and Sebastián Vidal Valenzuela.

On the other hand, and in dialog with that exhibition, is Cuatro artistas chilenos en el CAYC de Buenos Aires. Díaz, Dittborn, Jaar, Leppe (Four Chilean Artists at the CAYC in Buenos Aires. Díaz, Dittborn, Jaar, Leppe), an exhibition held at the headquarters of the Argentinean institution in 1985 at the initiative of Jorge Glusberg, congregating works by these four artists, all outstanding figures in Chile’s art scene.

This double show of sorts opened at Chile’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in November of 2020, with the idea of establishing a historical dialog between the two exhibitions, and at the same time, evidencing the cultural ties that linked Chile and Argentina in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Presenting this proposal today allows us to take a trip in time and to resignify the works with historical perspective and new meanings.

Given that the exhibition can be read as a manner of approaching the artistic exchanges that took place in our countries during the final decades of the 20 th century, it was natural to conceive of the project as a collaboration between both national Museums. To propitiate the circulation of the institutions’ collections is one of the objectives that we have set for ourselves as part of our ongoing administration, along with fortifying relationships with our peers in the region, in which case this rich opportunity for exchange encourages us to construct new scenarios for working together.

The exhibition also constitutes a historical reparation, in that it recovers an initiative that was frustrated by the coup d’état in Chile, in a case similar to that of the La exposición pendiente (The Pending Exhibition) which should have opened at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Chile’s capital in 1973, with the title Orozco, Rivera y Siqueiros. Pintura de México (Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros. Painting from Mexico). These three great Mexican muralists’ works finally came from the Carrillo Gil collection to be presented at the Museum in Chile in 2015, and then at Argentina’s Museum in 2016.

We would like to offer very special thanks to artists like Gonzalo Díaz, Eugenio Dittborn, Alfredo Jaar and the family of Carlos Leppe who participated in CAYC’s activities in 1985, for allowing us to utilize their works and even to reconstruct them when necessary. Such a relationship with artists of the stature of those mentioned constitutes a meaningful aspect of the proposal that unfolds in these exhibition halls.

With this show, we reaffirm our desire to strengthen the collaboration between both institutions along the lines of the tradition set by two inescapable figures of reference, Nemesio Antúnez and Jorge Glusberg, the respective Directors of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Chile and in Argentina, at different stages of our recent history.

This notable and to some extent unusual exhibition returns, then, to its point of origin in Buenos Aires, constituting a privileged occasion for comprehending the dynamics that challenge art museums today and the diverse levels on which they are engaged.

Fernando Pérez Oyarzun
Director of Chile’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes

Andrés Duprat
Director of Argentina’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes