Artists |
Victoria Colmegna

works
biography
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Victoria Colmegna
b.  1986, Buenos Aires
Lives and works in Buenos Aires.


She studied Filmmaking at Universidad del Cine, Buenos Aires 2006 -2010 / Fine Arts Meisterschule Städelschule, Frankfurt 2011-2015

‘Her work engages with the styles and  dynamics that dominate closed systems like cliques, schools or parties. Including herself and others in these scenes she creates a story-telling through performances and structures.’ 

‘The work self-critically reflects the making of the young artist’s oeuvre as a self-abusive practice within her immediate social context.’

‘The work is always over-curated, populous, somewhat apocryphal, it’s transpersonal; as in things done by many. By mixing, committing, hosting, inviting, ordering, demanding, and begging for different things from different people, she tries to find the cipher for selfhood’s unresolved dilemma.’

‘The work frantically border-hops between industries; fashion design, fan items, family memorabilia, medicine and art commodity. ‘

‘Her painting is photography based recollecting visual cues like a fashion police in a crime scene.’

‘She’s fascinated by psychology, alternative medicine, and kitsch.’

‘In essence, it is the liberal ideal of independence that your exhibition reveals to be a fiction. In this respect, your work stands within the tradition of psychoanalysis, which understands humans as dependent creatures, embedded within familial and social relations. Dependencies appear in your works, too, whether it is the Manson women’s dependency on their leader or Marie Antoinette’s dependency on the goodwill of her husband and the French people. And yet in spite of all this dependency – as your pictures seem to say – a certain degree of independence and self-determined action is still possible. Fashion serves as the vehicle for this action – your pictures declare it to be the driving force behind an appearance of self-determination. Fashion makes it possible to overcome factual dependencies, at least for the moment of the staging. Artists, too, now find themselves confronted with a multitude of “radical dependencies” (Butler), from the pressures of the market to dependency on social media, since ignoring the latter can be tantamount to risking social death. Under these circumstances, there is no “free space”. At most, we can work through the productive and destructive qualities of the dependencies in which we are entangled. It is precisely because social structures constrain our freedom in ways we can experience as destructive and conflict-ridden and/or enriching and motivating that we have to negotiate them – including artistically. To my mind, that is exactly what your paintings achieve!’
106-195 St Patrick St bonny@conditions.biz