Hot! Contemporary art from Chile

Magdalena Atria

Magdalena Atria's early production of delicate, process-driven painting and drawing (left) was accompanied by a growing interest in unconventional materials - particularly plasticine, the cheap moulding putty used by children.

Refining her use of the medium into meticulously crafted, large-scale works, Atria kneads and blends the material almost as if it were unctuous, intensely-coloured paint (below).

Three-dimensional works by the artist - such as an orb-like structure of cocktail sticks (left) - reveal similar qualities of painstaking, labour-intensive execution, together with an emphasis on fragile monumentality that raises everyday materials far beyond their humble status and prescribed parameters of use.

 

Catalina Bauer

Catalina Bauer's practice also hinges on a preoccupation with humble materials and their transformation into dramatic new form.

Equally important to Bauer, however, are concerns with Chilean identity and community, themes made manifest, for example, in the use of water-filled plastic bags to create a giant, wall-based representation of Chile as seen on a map (above).

Such interests are often linked to the processes through which her works are created.

Column, for example (left), consists of thousands of rubber bands knitted together, the method of fabrication suggesting a routine which ordinary Chilean women regularly undertake.

Additionally, Bauer's work is frequently produced on a communal basis, with volunteers providing the labour to create complex collaborative pieces.

Repetition not only serves to produce dramatic artworks: it forms the basis of most our lives and indeed, the rhythms of nature and time itself.

A hammock constructed of old flour sacks (below) is filled with earth from which wheat seeds sprout.

A clear allusion to agricultural toil, the work also references life's simple, essential pleasures (food; rest) and the perpetual cycles of growth and renewal.

A regeneration which, in many ways, echoes the dramatic repurposing of the everyday which Catalina Bauer undertakes in her art.

next: Iván Navarro and Tomás Rivas

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