Magdalena Jitrik

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1966

            In the last thirty years, few artists in Argentina have managed to make the relationship between art and politics as interesting and significant as Magdalena Jitrik. Trained in Mexico, due to her parents' exile, and on her return to Argentina, having become one of the most important painters of her generation, Jitrik has developed a zone of confluence between her political thought and the pictorial styles of the 20th century, an endeavor that begin with her first exhibitions. Thus, her geometric, concrete, or formalist approaches seek to preserve and update the emancipatory memory in which they were conceived. In addition, Jitrik's work has been sensitive to the contexts and environments in which painting finds its place and the way in which space semanticizes the pieces.

            An example of this is the site-specific installation made in 2003: Árboles de cuadros, located in a vacant lot next to the Brukman textile company. The installation consisted of a series of paintings, hanging from a tree next to the company where the workers had been evicted and where a series of spontaneous protests and assembly actions were taking place. In this way, the pieces were in tune with the political revolt; in effect, Jitrik's poetics postulate less of an institutional critique directed at museums and galleries and more of a political critique of the need to connect art with concrete practices.

            In Árboles de cuadros, the artistic action moves from the paintings to the photographic record of the specific assemblage, showing an interest that is the backbone of her work: the way in which spaces add and attach meanings to the pieces. This interest began at the end of 2000 with Ensayo de un museo libertario, an intervention in the space of the Federación Libertaria Argentina that sought to activate a center of anarchist thought. In this sense, the thread that unites her proposals to this day is linked to the idea of crisis: the crisis of painting, the crisis of politics, the crisis of meaning.