In the October 24 issue of Artforum, an excellent article written by Megan Kincaid featuring our represented artist Antonio Pichilla participating at the Institute for Latin American Art Studies (ISLAA) in the collective exhibit ‘Threads of the South.’ “The show—encompassing sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and film—grappled with the notion of “textile” as a fugitive concept more than a materialist or functionalist category. Works mounted to the wall, initially passing as paintings, transgressed modernist convention (and with it colonialist, masculinist, and capitalist frameworks)…Guatemalan artist Antonio Pichillá similarly recast the interrelation between Indigenous craft and abstraction: His Nudo (Knot), 2015, features two stringent knots wrapped around a geometric composition of dull yellow, listless green, and murky white. Paradoxically constricting and supporting the painting, Pichillá draws on the Mayan calendrical system’s conflation of continuous beginnings and endings as an antidote to formalism’s increasingly obsolete ideology of self-containment.”
October 1, 2024
