CECILIA VICUÑA: LA MIGRANTA BLUE NIPPLE
Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present La Migranta Blue Nipple, the gallery’s second solo exhibition in New York by Cecilia Vicuña.
November 21, 2024 – January 11, 2025
The exhibition, encompassing all three floors of the gallery, also includes the first US presentation of Vicuña’s monumental quipu, NAUFraga (2022), since its premiere at the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as a new film based on unseen footage shot while participating in Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece. The works on display are informed conceptually by the principles of “Arte Precario,” or Precarious Art, the artist’s own autonomous aesthetic system that foregrounds ephemerality, intangibility, and that which disappears.
As an artistic corollary to the instability and shakiness that abounds in our political climate, Vicuña’s precariousness allows her to grapple with issues ranging from immigration to environmental destruction. At the same time, her syncretic visual vocabulary prompts speculation on alternative possible futures, or worlds capable of realizing political, feminist, ecological, and conceptual reparation.
The title of the exhibition, La Migranta Blue Nipple, makes reference to Vicuña’s personal experience with migration and to the brutal treatment of migrant and immigrant communities that she has witnessed while living in this country. Visitors to the exhibition will first encounter a series of paintings completed this year that recreate, in oil on canvas, drawings Vicuña made in 1978 but which have since been lost or destroyed, existing only in the artist’s memory and in limited photographic documentation.
Vicuña’s rituals are offerings intended to restore the world’s wounded memory as a way of “turning around the waves of the system” currently leading us towards extermination.
La Migranta Blue Nipple invites reflection and contemplation through Vicuña’s multidimensional practice. The artist’s return to the spiritual universe of the Orixás offers a way to understand and perhaps offer hope for the future.