Frieze Masters : Queering Modernism: Visual Languages of the 20th Century,
Luis Fernando Zapata (1951–1994) developed, during the 1980s and early 1990s, a sculptural vocabulary in which archaeology, ritual, embodiment, and mortality converge. Drawing on sustained research into ancient cultures and experiences gathered during travels through South America, Egypt, North Africa, and the Middle East, he created a series of works titled stelae, ritual objects, tombs, barges, and Sarcófago that appear to belong to civilizations at once ancient and imaginary.
Constructed from hand-molded paper pulp, natural pigments, sand, and found materials, these works embody a fundamental contradiction. They evoke the endurance of stone monuments, archaeological remains, and exequial objects, yet are made from contextualized substances of marked physical fragility. Permanence is therefore highlighted by the ephemerality of matter; symbolically proposed through what we conceive as the object's aim to survive as a sign, trace, and memory.
From 1990 onward, as Zapata confronted his HIV status and mortality, his investigation into the origins, disappearance, and persistence of art took on an increasingly existential dimension. Abstraction became a ritual language. Signs resist decipherment; vessels imply passage; tombs become door sills; and works from the Sarcófago series hold together the elements that mark the thresholds between the body's vulnerability and its transformation into a spiritual realm.
Presented in Queering Modernism: Visual Languages of the 20th Century, curated by Anke Kempkes, Zapata's work can be approached as profound research into the archaeology of ephemerality: a practice in which modernist reduction is redirected toward histories, embodied experience, and forms of memory that resist disappearance.
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The Elvira Moreno Gallery (Bogotá) is participating for the first time in Frieze Masters, a sector dedicated to showcasing a unique contemporary perspective on historically significant artworks from ancient eras, old masters, and the late 20th century. Under the curatorial leadership of Anke Kempkes, this section is dedicating a sector titled Queering Modernism: Visual Languages of the 20th Century, committed to contending with the politics of oblivion, seeking to reposition historically marginalized practices developed independently and to situate modern perspectives within the frame of contemporary queer and trans discourses.
The exhibition pays homage to the legacy of Luis Fernando Zapata (1951–1994), whose work constitutes a profound meditation on human fragility, spirituality, and the permanence of memory. Through sculptural objects, reliefs, and ritual objects created between 1988 and 1994, Zapata conceived art as a space of transition between the earthly and the eternal, intertwining influences from Mesoamerican, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian cultures with a reflection on the body and time.
His practice, developed primarily in Paris during the late 1980s, solidified as an act of aesthetic resistance against the impact of HIV. In dialogue with his life experience, his work becomes a silent manifesto of transcendence: each barge, stele, or sarcophagus stands as a symbolic threshold —a "door of light" to the immemorial.
The project follows our first exhibit of Luis Fernando Zapata in our space in 2024, which alluded to the concept formulated by Jean-François Lyotard, who defined ‘the inmemorial’ as "that which cannot be remembered or forgotten, it is that which returns uncannily." At a time when contemporary art revisits notions of ritual, body, and spirituality, Zapata's work acquires a luminous relevance, revealing art's capacity to endure as a testament to the human soul and the legacy bestowed by those affected by the AIDS epidemic.
The work of Luis Fernando Zapata is part of recent prestigious institutional acquisitions, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid), the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York), The Miami ICA, the Banco de la República Museum (Bogotá), and the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO), as well as prominent private collections in the Americas, Europe, and Latin America. It is now being exhibited simultaneously at the ICA Los Angeles, Wrightwood 659 Chicago, and ICA Miami, and as part of the permanent exhibit at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.
The Elvira Moreno Gallery is a space dedicated to research, experimentation, and progressive thought, focusing on exhibitions that explore the relevance of contemporary art, the international historical influences on Latin American art, the rediscovery of fundamental and transcendent artists who died as a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and contemporary manifestos that lead to a broader and more complete understanding of new artistic languages and paradigms in contemporary Latin American art.
CONTACT
Francisco Arévalo
Program Director
+1 305 542 8990 gallery@galeriaelviramoreno.com www.galeriaelviramoreno.com IG: @galeria_elviramoreno
