The exhibition ‘Ricardo Yrarrázaval: Three Decades’ brings together works by Chilean artist Ricardo Yrarrázaval created between 1964 and 1986, from various private collections and the Il Posto Collection, offering a journey through almost thirty years of the artist’s production.
Initially formed in ceramics and later at the School of Fine Arts in Rome and the Académie Julien in Paris, Yrarrázaval established himself on the Chilean scene as one of the most unique painters of his generation. In 1966, he won the Guggenheim Fellowship to work in New York, and throughout his career he received distinctions such as Second Prize at the Lima Biennial (1968) and First Prize in the Painting Competition of the Colocadora Nacional de Valores (Chile, 1975).
According to the curator of the exhibition, Antonio Echeverría, returning to Yrarrázaval’s work today means confronting figures and images that resist fixation. In them is revealed an archaic artificiality, where representation insists on approaching a simulated other: anonymous and displaced figures whose identities are lost in the canvas. These images allow us to trace an arqueology of masculinities: rigid and mysterious presences, subject to the codes of the city and work, which expose the fragility of their cosmetics as well as the power of their gazes. This body of work, this social novel and set of accumulated gestures, is sustained by disidentification and thus opens up a space for thinking about difference.
