Guillermo Núñez & la Escena de Avanzada
21.04.2023 - 27.05.2023 

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Memoria presents Guillermo Núñez & la Escena de Avanzada, a review capsule of the conceptual work of Guillermo Núñez (Santiago de Chile, 1930) which represents his first appearance in Europe in the last 40 years.Núñez, one of the key artists of Latin America, Chilean National Award Winner in 2007, vindicates his conceptual strategies since the late 1960s through his Poster Shop silkscreen project, reviewing the Printuras y Exculturas exhibition that cost the torture and the subsequent exile of the artist in 1975, until his artistic actions carried out from his French exile where he will remain until 1986.

 

The curatorial narrative is made up of 80 pieces including serigraphs and artifacts that present and demonstrate the catalytic and early importance of this artist in the use of images and documents, positioning him as a precursor engine of the conceptual practices typical of the Chilean Advanced Scene, term that would be coined by the critic of French origin Nelly Richard. Guillermo Núñez, historiographically considered to date as an artist alien to this movement and reviewed mainly from his purely pictorial aspect, deployed in this project all his conceptual and semantic strength that influenced many artists of future generations such as Eugenio Dittborn, Carlos Leppe or the CADA group in Chile, as well as similar artistic movements in Europe such as Art Povera and the international Fluxus movement.

 

The Chilean artist, through his series Libertad Condicional and Suma Arqueológica, moves away from an aestheticizing effect of painting and proposes a syntactic break that distances the viewer from the idea of totality. In the words of the author: ¨This conceptual work mixes screen printing and art actions from bland documents that are charged with meaning through the creative process. Then, the innocent images become guilty¨ (A cage, La Monalisa, a lamp, a cage, a row of missionaries). Guillermo Núñez’s body of work from this period operates in a certain way under an oblique language and lack of directionality, almost contrary to the type of work carried out years before during the Popular Unity, whose message and language was subordinated to its propaganda function. In his Avanzada works, Núñez encrypts and codifies his language that totally polarizes that duality.

 

Memoria adds to the commitment of museum institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art NYC-MOMA or the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, who have recently incorporated works from this critical period of the author into their collections, thus inserting a much more conceptual constellation and languages extensive and enriching.

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