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Untitled - Three Approaches to Contemporary Visual Art from Peru

Presented by Gallery of Contemporary Art at UCCS at GOCA 1420

December 12, 2008-February 14, 2009

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This exhibition includes works by Cristian Alarcón, Fernando Gutierrez and Diego Lama, three visual artists from Lima, Peru. Their works allow us to address contemporary art from Peru through multiple perspectives and ideas on identity, resistance and embodiment.

Implicit in these artistic approaches are reflections upon the relationship between artist and technique, image and domination, violence and body. Untitled aims to reflect upon the evolving nature of contemporary Peruvian art in its dialogue with global and local languages and perspectives.

Fernando Gutierrez “Huanchaco” develops the story of Superchaco, a tragic Peruvian superhero. Through paintings, videos and animations, Superchaco helps us reflect on the new urban and global cultures as they affect visions and aspirations in emerging societies. Influenced by comics and pop culture, Huanchaco steals, recycles and subverts new but established symbols of consumer culture, rendering them “Peruvian’ in all their contradiction and reconfigured symbolic content.

Diego Lama approaches conflict and violence from a very personal and physical perspective, using cinematic resources to reflect upon their relationship to painting and photography. Lama’s conscious approach in the use of visual media and his interest in addressing essential themes as love and death, provides for pieces of exquisite yet sordid textures, sublime and twisted characters whose internal conflicts rise and deform what is to be expected.

Works by Cristian Alarcón come from a preoccupation with the Peruvian periphery – the provinces – and their experience with armed violence in recent history. Working with animation, Alarcón creates a Peruvian character, The Cuy-rata, rendering it a grotesque creature, who literally eats alive the naive yet loaded referent of Mickey Mouse, the famous rodent, as “naturally” as most Peruvians eat the traditional baked guinea pig or “cuy” dish; a mediated circle of food and ingestion of symbols and ideologies.