Magdalena Atria

Santiago de Chile, Chile - 1966

            Magdalena Atria is a Chilean visual artist who seeks to leave her mark through various tools that oscillate between the playful and the political. Although her career began with a particular interest in painting, her work has fluctuated over time between sculpture, photography and installation. In her work, there is a marked search for the possibilities enabled by visual language to convey ideas and emotions, to explore the crossroads between everyday and spiritual life. 

            Certain that an artistic life allows us to reveal a dimension of the existence and the world that would be impossible to access in any other way, in a masterclass at the Catholic University of Chile she explained that one of her favorite materials is plasticine, as it allows her to work with something familiar that reminds her of her childhood, but that can also be transformed and reveal new possibilities. Atria produces images that wander between the geometric and the organic, based on mathematical structures, but without neglecting the affective dimension. Her work is completely handmade, and on a large scale, one can see the complexity of her production and her imprint in the material. Plasticine never hardens, it is not permanent. Contrary to an immutable idea of art, Atria pursues change, metamorphosis, and for that, she uses a living material that changes with temperature and deforms if touched. 

            Her pieces carry out an undertaking that may seem impossible: to combine play, sensory, colors and shapes with public knowledge issues such as, for example, the murder of Argentine photographer José Luis Cabezas. She always chooses an alternative perspective. In this case, she worked from the branch detected by the photographer's camera. This element is typical of the curious art of radiesthesia, in which a bifurcated branch of a tree is used to detect mineral deposits, buried treasures and hidden or lost objects or people, through the detection of the radiation they emit.  In the series, called "Rabdomante", Magdalena Atria reproduces this element, paints it, charges it with meaning, makes it known; at the same time she finds a new way to reflect on an unsolved murder. 

            In a double action in which playfulness enables reflection, in which the artisanal dedication to the materials provokes striking works, Atria expresses an intensity that only an artist who works from absolute planning can have. And yet, at the same time, she is capable of leaving her works to the fate of time, convinced that they are something alive, something with the right to mutate throughout its days.