Marcelo Pombo

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1959

            Marcelo Pombo is one of the most relevant artists in recent history in Latin American contemporary art. Although he began his artistic practice in the early 1980s, his first exhibitions date back to the end of the decade, in which through works on a small scale and made on precarious supports and media, he illuminated the emerging relationships between art, gay culture, and the underground of that time. His aesthetic production had a fundamental gravitation in Argentine art of the 1990s and he was a central figure in the group of artists who participated in the Centro Cultural Rojas Gallery. Characterized by an imagination linked at the same time to the ornamental and the artisanal, Pombo's work recovers "low" or illegitimate techniques and materials, linked to domesticity and craftsmanship. Since then, his work has revolved around the search for and updating of these minor traditions within Argentine and Latin American art.

            From 1999 onwards, he focused almost exclusively on making paintings with synthetic enamel on panels, where he associated various styles: surreal and visionary landscape, folksy landscape, geometric art, and abstract expressionism. Through an obsessive and meticulous technique, he created in these works a hypnotic and obsessive effect. With the series "Floating Ranches," made in the 2000s, he explores the popular religiosity of shrines contained in both decorative practices and the contemplative participation of intimate sacredness. From 2008 to the present, his work has focused on the past of Argentine and Latin American art, both that which was left out of the modern narrative and the eccentric and deviant translations of the avant-garde canon, exploring artists and areas of work outside the official radar of trends and established narratives.

            He has held numerous solo exhibitions in Argentina and the United States and is part of private collections and collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts (Buenos Aires), Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, Malba-Fundación Costantini (Buenos Aires), Castagnino+Macro Museum (Rosario), Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat Art Collection (Buenos Aires), Blanton Museum of Art (Texas), among others.