Ana Gallardo

Rosario, Argentina – 1958

            Ana Gallardo is a visual artist, feminist activist, weaver of bonds that are part of her life and her work. She works with the languages within her reach, she is self-taught and autobiographical. Her mother was an artist and died when she was very young; like her mother, she began painting, but realized, as time went by, that she was terrible at it. After several unsuccessful attempts to be recognized for her work, after sending her pieces to different contests, and trying to insert herself in a market designed mainly for men, she decided to close her workshop. Tidying up her things, in her eagerness to put an end to a phase, she taped each of her tools to the wall. When a friend arrived at the house and saw what she had done, he thought that there was a new work. In the eye that observed and in Ana herself a mean was born, which was pictorial but also sculptural, in which a new way of producing found its form. 

            From that moment on, the course of her artistic life took a turn that led her into different performances, from setting up a mobile home with her things and carrying them on her bicycle to the gallery, to taping all the objects that belonged to the men who passed through her life, but mainly to make visible the macho violence both in art and in life.  She herself, her existence, is her own material. She is always moved by the theme; the rest is usually anecdotal. Her practice arises from the link with others and from a specific activity that often occurs outside the limits of the exhibition room. Violence, particularly in the world of women, old age, and precariousness, tend to be constant themes in her work. 

            Gallardo has given visibility to women, to diversities, to the elderly with a work made to be moved, to participate, to think, to fight. Although over the years her work has undergone different metamorphoses, in her artistic work there is a common horizon: to repair the damage, to help and accompany while producing work. She is a warrior artist who works with her fears, inventing new ways of living and bonding. Because above the vertigo of change, for Gallardo there is first a duty: to discover and give form to all the manifestations of desire.