Carrie Bencardino

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1993

            Carrie Bencardino’s painting manages to feel both familiar and strange at the same time. Scenes, characters, objects, and motifs that circulate across the internet as well as within Buenos Aires’ cultural scene appear within fluid and uncertain atmospheres. Through these shifts and displacements, she constructs a visual universe in which millennial visual culture, the underground, punk, and queer aesthetics constantly intermingle. Her work is particularly interested in those states in which reality seems to become fantasy.

            Bencardino holds a degree in Visual Arts from the National University of the Arts (UNA). In 2019, she attended the Artists Program at the Torcuato Di Tella University, and in 2020 participated in the Artists x Artists Program at Fundación El Mirador. She has also undertaken studio mentorships with Manuel Amestoy and Flavia Da Rin. In 2024, she was awarded the Oxerford Grant and took part in the Las Cicadas residency in Spain.

            Her work often draws from experiences such as parties, concerts, and the sensitive entanglements produced by bodies moving together, moments in which forms cease to be perceived as stable. Within these scenes, the human figure appears in tension with fiction and with the images that circulate incessantly throughout contemporary culture.

            Dreams and nightmares function in her practice as territories of learning. Within them emerge desires, fears, remnants, and projections—spaces where what we produce and what separates from us are equally revealed. Throughout Bencardino’s work there is a persistent commitment to sustaining spaces of intensity, pleasure, and imagination as forms of vitality. Her paintings do not seek to escape reality but rather to move through it from an unstable, affective, and embodied sensibility.

            Her materials and brushwork create images that remain open, mutable, and susceptible to excess, allowing the real and the dreamlike to coexist on the same surface. Her work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries including MALBA, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Fundación Cazadores, Voloshyn Gallery, among others. She currently lives and works in Buenos Aires.