'Carrion, the Last Form': the exhibition at the Recoleta Museum that brings together Berni, Forner, Maresca, and Stern

Antonio Berni , Raquel Forner , Liliana Maresca , and Grete Stern are just a few of the artists whose powerful works make up the exhibition Carroña última forma , at the Cronopios room of the Centro Cultural Recoleta , curated by Carla Barbero and Javier Villa. The title pays homage to the eponymous book by Leónidas Lamborghini (1927–2009), one of the most singular and powerful voices in 20th-century Argentine poetry.

As soon as you cross the entrance door, you will find fragments of that book, published in 2001 , on the wall that forms the anteroom of the space: a work full of humor, horror and excess, by an author who always maintained a strong connection with the political history of the country, especially with Peronism, which served as an aesthetic and ideological inspiration.

As the exhibition text indicates, in Carroña última forma , published in 2001, in the midst of a social and political collapse, Lamborghini “gives voice to a vagabond who wanders through a hallucinating city: the words are streets, the city a decomposing body, and that body is also poetry. This work, which gives the exhibition its title, is presented here in its entirety as a necessary prologue.”

This beginning of the journey sets the tone and nuance of the visual path that awaits within and that—in dialogue with that work—assumes carrion not as waste, but as the ultimate form: that which persists, that which speaks from the corroded.

The exhibition thus foregrounds an Argentine tradition of abject realism that persists and prevents us from looking elsewhere . What in Lamborghini was poetry of the rubble here becomes a powerful curatorial challenge, a journey that connects 20th-century masters with a contemporary scene that dares to inhabit the despicable, the vile, the infamous.

The nearly forty works assembled here explore figures of the wounded body, the remnants of history, and the imaginary of power through intensified, grotesque, hallucinatory, and sometimes hyperbolic languages. Through eleven artists, this visual essay connects mid-20th-century avant-garde movements with contemporary expressions that stretch the boundaries of a "delirious" local realism.

“The exhibition gives substance to what is often overlooked —the murky, the abject, that which we don't want to see—but which is a central part of our visual and political history,” curator Carla Barbero tells Clarín . “ There is a tradition of abject realism that is taken to the extreme in this exhibition, to the point of fable, allegory, and delirium,” she adds.

The exhibition traces a visual lineage that begins with pioneering figures such as Raquel Forner, whose painting “La Victoria” (1939) presents a mutilated woman as a symbolic transposition of Jesus Christ, denouncing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of European fascism.

This work—right in the heart of the room —hangs from the ceiling, like a religious figure . Just below it, on a pristine white platform that echoes the atmosphere of an altar, two works by Antonio Berni can be seen. "La guerra" (War) and "La torturada" (The Tortured Woman), both from 1976, provide an early account of the horrors of the last civil-military dictatorship.

This idea of ​​the female body at the center of the scene is taken up in another work located very close by, by Grete Stern, with her iconic photomontages for the magazine Idilio . Domestic surrealism, gender critique, and symbolic violence converge in these dreamlike images that remain relevant today, decades later.

In the post-dictatorship period, the tension between body and history found one of its most radical expressions in Liliana Maresca. In her celebrated “Public Image – High Sphere” (1993), she papered this very Recoleta Cultural Center with portraits of politicians, military personnel, and celebrities, interspersed with a nude image of herself: a declaration of principles regarding the artist's body as a public figure, as a living archive of an Argentina in ruins , and as a response to the advance of neoliberalism. “Maresca is key to thinking about the body as a catalyst for social trauma,” Barbero affirms.

The artist Marcia Schvartz, on the other hand, traverses the exhibition like a pivotal figure. “ Her work bridges the two centuries ,” Barbero maintains. “Her work pivots between the intimate and the political with a unique ferocity.” Schvartz's installations “Berniadas” and “El ambiente” “transform the remnants of history into a fierce and current memory.”

In dialogue with this visual and political genealogy, a new generation of contemporary artists updates the forms of excess, the grotesque, and allegory.

Verónica Meloni embodies urban and gender tensions in public spaces, while Verónica Gómez, Tobias Dirty, and Santiago O. Rey deploy a grotesque and baroque repertoire, where the abject and the monstrous are embodied materially and symbolically. "All of the participating artists have a unique, powerful imagery and a consolidated body of work," Barbero notes.

The exhibition's layout reinforces the tension that threads the journey . The white walls slowly darken upward, culminating in a dark, somber gray-painted ceiling.

The first works in the room have their backs to the door, so the first thing you see are white panels , like a denial of the image, and then you find this sort of altar in the center of the space, in a montage that moves between iconoclasm and veneration.

“We were interested in creating a design that spoke to the artists' strategies ,” Barbero explains. “The light boxes, for example (which house Berni's works), remind me of street signs, the advertising you see waiting for the bus: images that seem harmless, but carry a symbolic violence that we don't always want to see.”

Tension runs through the proposal from beginning to end , and in this persistent language of allusion to the corroded, the exhibition speaks not only to the past but also to the present.

Carrion, the Last Form, can be visited at the Recoleta Cultural Center, Junín 1930. Tuesday through Friday from 12 to 21, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays from 11 to 21. Free admission for Argentines and residents until September 30.