NADA New York 2022

Fernanda Laguna (born Hurlingham, Buenos Aires, 1972) is considered one of the most influential Argentinean artists of her generation, due to her vision —seamlessly blending art and life— and her multifaceted art practice which centers on visual art but includes celebrated poetry and novels, the creation of a series of alternative cultural spaces, and an effective on-going social practice which she has carried on for over 18 years in the marginalized shantytown of Villa Fiorito.

Her work relies on an immediacy of expression of her subjectivity and desire; appropriation of local popular handcrafts and iconography; an interest in precarious materials used in domestic contexts and, at the same time, in classic Latin American Modernist painterly traditions such as geometric abstraction or surrealism, which she appropriates and turns upside down by incorporating playful feminist connotations.

In “The Path of the Heart”, her current exhibition, at The Drawing Center in New York, many of Laguna’s small scale drawings have been included, as she has been making them for a long time. The hairy heart stands as an avatar for Laguna herself, these drawings, then, are deeply diaristic, depicting scenes from her life and her inner states.