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NEW AIRS FOR CONTEMPORARY ART IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA.

Neptuna house by the sea. José Ignacio, Uruguay.


Arthaus house in the Buenos Aires city. Buenos Aires, Argentina.


The Baptistery of the Mondongo group.


The pandemic year 2021 ends with a couple of happy and promising news for the field of art on both sides of the Río de la Plata, the birth of two new foundations with separate spaces. Located in Buenos Aires, Arthaus Central begins its march, while in José Ignacio, Uruguay, Casa Neptuna was inaugurated last November.



Here in Buenos Aires, in the downtown


We read in the founding texts of Arthaus Central that “It was born as a production and research proposal, crossed by the intersection of contemporary artistic practices. Intended for the experimentation of artists, curators, critics and researchers from different disciplines where the voice of producers, theoretical knowledge and sensitive experience intersect ”. For these purposes Arthaus plans for the next 2022 various incentive programs for contemporary art. Creation laboratories and scholarships for the performing arts for young creators and two strategic alliances with public institutions of capital importance, the National Museum of Fine Arts and the Colón Theater. In conjunction with the latter, it projects a prize for the creation and premiere of operas, ballets and symphonic works. While with the most important museum of visual arts in our country, it promises the acquisition of works to add to its heritage and the realization of subsidies to creators for the realization of exhibitions in the museum itself, as well as economic contributions to both institutions . Another of his actions, in this case already carried out, was the purchase of the Baptistery of Colors, a dodecahedron with a maximum width of 6.31 meters (from vertex to vertex), which contains an immersive installation, with walls covered in the entire spectrum chromatic: a palette of 3,275 shades of plasticine, the work of the outstanding artist collective, Mondongo (1), exhibited until recently at the Barro de La Boca gallery. This ambitious project was born under the foundation and direction of Andrés Buhar, a metallurgical and construction entrepreneur.


The emergence of Arthaus Central as a space, nestled in the micro-center of the city, is as fortunate and stimulating as the planned actions. Its headquarters will be an immense building designed by the Berdichevsky Studio at Bartolomé Miter 434. Its location also bets on the revitalization of the Buenos Aires microcenter, the financial area hit by the pandemic and the “home office”, which seeks to change its profile, revaluing its unique architecture and privileged location. Arthaus Central will have various intervention spaces: a central hall, 1000 m2 exhibition rooms, an auditorium for more than 150 people - in which the sound engineer Gustavo Basso, responsible for the acoustics of the Teatro Colón, el Argentino de La Plata and the Blue Whale of the Kirchner Cultural Center, among other rooms, a 1000 m2 terrace, and a 600 m2 gastronomic project. Arthaus has been conceived as the confluence between contemporary creation and the public. In such a way that both its auditorium and its exhibition rooms and the social meeting space on the terrace will promote new forms of aesthetic experience and art-leisure-life articulation.


Arthaus was born in the context of a city with a rich artistic history that places it among the most important cultural capitals in the world. It will share the environment with training institutions, from the most traditional ones such as the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts (today the Visual Arts Department of the National University of the Arts), the mythical Di Tella Institute (today the University) and the effervescent scene of the independent theater, in addition to the totemic Teatro Colón and the National Museum of Fine Arts, traditional public institutions with which it will also share agreements.


And on the other side of the Río de la Plata


Amalia Amoedo, the youngest granddaughter of Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat (2), just inaugurated last November the Ama Amoedo Artistic Residence Foundation and its headquarters, Casa Neptuna, a physical space where it will receive emerging artists from Latin America. Designed by the great Argentine pop artist Edgardo Giménez, the house stands out for its shape and colors, and without a doubt, it will soon be an icon of the place, as it is in City Bell the Blue House, once designed by Giménez for Marta and Jorge Romero Brest . It is located in a paradisiacal space in front of the sea in José Ignacio, Uruguay, about two hundred meters from the also famous house that her grandmother built in the early 90s.


The "Ama Amoedo Artistic Residence Foundation" develops a program of artistic residencies. We write in the present tense, since part of the selected artists are already there. The residencies will last six weeks and will conclude with their participation in Miami Art Week in 2022. The first selection committee is made up of Magalí Arriola, Director of the Tamayo Museum; Inti Guerrero, Artistic Director of Bellas Artes Projects in the Philippines and tutor of the KASK Curatorial Studies program in Belgium, and Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Director of the Americas Society in New York. And as we said, two artists are already at Casa Neptuna, Marcela Sinclair and the Puerto Rican Sofía Gallisá Muriente, completing the first group of resident artists with Liliana Angulo Cortés, Andres Bedoya, Adriana Bustos and Noé Martínez.


Casa Neptuna is directed by the manager and lawyer from Santa Fe Violeta Mansilla. Thus, this house, founded and directed by two women, takes the name of Neptuna (and not Neptune). The feminine and marine power reunited, closer to the goddess Iemanjá, of African heritage and worshiped throughout our continent and especially, in Uruguay, than the legendary -and distant- Neptune.


Returning to the house and its design, the artist Edgardo Gimenez adopted simple geometric shapes, straight lines, sloping walls, the stridency of an electric green in the building, and geometric figures on the ceiling in other colors. And some circular windows and hemispherical glass, type "porthole" that more closely resemble the eyes of some marine animal. The artist stated that he “wanted the house to be a place of freedom. A place where you have the right to be creative”.


Multidisciplinarity runs through the very emergence of these two new foundations and spaces. On the one hand, the collector Amalia Amoedo is also a visual artist, displaying her art in clothing design, painting and sculpture, while Andrés Buhar, founder and director of Arthaus, is a businessman, member of the Malba Foundation , and also a musician and composer.


The appearances of Arthaus and Casa Neptuna in the local cultural scene continue with a series of openings of large spaces, official or private, dedicated to the production and conservation of contemporary cultural heritage. Looking back over the last twenty years, in the city of Buenos Aires the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA) was inaugurated in 2001, the Haroldo Conti Cultural Center of Memory, in the former ESMA in 2004, the Fortabat Collection Museum in 2008, the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (MAMBA) in 2010 and two years later, next door, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires (MACBA). Series that is expanded with two large openings of official spaces, in 2011 the Usina del Arte was born in the La Boca neighborhood, and in 2015 the Kirchner Cultural Center. Welcome, Casa Neptuna and Arthaus to the local art scene!


Arthaus Central. Web: https://www.arthaus.ar/

Casa Neptuna. Web: https://fundacionamaamoedo.org/


Notes:

1. Mondongo was born in 1999 and today is made up of Juliana Laffitte (Buenos Aires, 1974) and Manuel Mendanha (Buenos Aires, 1976).

2. Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat (1921-2012), was an outstanding businesswoman -her husband, Alfredo Fortabat, built the Loma Negra cement plant, which Amalita inherited -, an art collector and patron; She created a Foundation and in 2008 she inaugurated the Fortabat Museum, designed by the Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly, which houses her collection.



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