Address all the aspects of Jorge Gumier Maier (1953-2021) before the 90s. Give an account of his cultural artistic career and analyze the network of multiple practices that he deployed before leaving his indelible mark on local art: illustration, performance, painting, writing on the gay issue and on sociocultural issues, participation in the Buenos Aires underground. That’s what From the Margins proposed. Gumier Maier in the 80s, at the National Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition that brings together nearly 90 paintings, drawings, illustrations, photographs, publications and documents from the first years of the artist’s career, curated by Natalia Pineau. Many of the works have never been exhibited before or were only seen decades ago.
Maier made the pieces between 1978 and 1989, before setting foot at the Rojas Cultural Center and unleashing the renewal of the visual arts in the 90s: the exhibition reveals the artist before taking that helm. Jorge Gumier Maier before being Gumier.
After interviewing the artist between 2009 and 2020, Pineau accessed the corpus of works that had been stored in a house in Gumier in Constitución. The first time she went with Miguel Harte, her partner, to look for material in that place where the fabrics and papers had been stored for decades. Some works were badly damaged by humidity. But the rest was a treasure that excited Pineau. “In that jumble I found pieces and took photos of them and sent them to Gumier. He told me: I exposed this in such and such a place. He became enthusiastic about works that he had not seen since the moment he exhibited them,” says the curator.
Pineau investigated the conditions of possibility that made the Gumier Maier of the 90s: from that moment on he exhaustively investigated the 80s. “No one becomes Gumier Maier from nothing. He arrived at Rojas with a speech about the artistic where one finds a lot of reflection. He finds that he develops a program in the nineties that is not that of someone who barely looked at the art world from the outside, but who was inside – I knew that he had been in the underworld, of course. I wondered how this guy, who had erased his career from the eighties, suddenly becomes the figure of the nineties,” says the curator.
Much of the material was restored especially for this exhibition. Paola Vega was in charge of the supervision and organization of the team made up of Rosario Villani and Mario Llullaillaco, who carried out the task of cataloging and conservation guards. Many of the pieces are on public display for the first time, there are also two pieces from private collections.
A key figure in Argentine art in the 1990s, Gumier developed an important body of work and as curator in charge of the Rojas gallery he carried out an exhibition program that made visible the artistic productions of young creators who investigated a personal aesthetic.
Artist, curator, cultural agitator, Gumier not only played a key role in the defense of sexual minorities in democracy, but also changed the way of thinking and making art once and for all. He gave a place to those who occupied a marginal place because they were not devoted to the painting of the eighties and he developed a way of thinking where hierarchies between high and low culture, between design, decoration and art do not prevail.
In his youth, he enrolled in a degree in Psychology and dedicated himself to political activity from the ranks of the Revolutionary Communist Party. In the eighties, he developed his activity as an artist, journalist and activist of the GAG (Gay Action Group). He participated in numerous individual and group exhibitions. He also wrote for magazines such as El porteño, Vox and Cerdos y Peces.
He transformed the cultural center, dependent on the University of Buenos Aires, into a place of resistance and experimentation, from where he opposed the dominant artistic trends. One piece of information illustrates the spirit that drove it: the first exhibition at the Rojas was an installation by Liliana Maresca. Since the cleaning staff thought it was garbage and threw it away, it had to be completely put back together.
In his manifesto “Avatars of art”, from 1989, he promoted “a domestic curatorial model”, based on “sensitivity” and “taste”. Some called this new impulse that emerged with democracy “light.” Alfredo Londaibere, Sebastián Gordin, Pablo Suárez, Cristina Schiavi, Marcelo Pombo, Miguel Harte, Fernanda Laguna and Elba Bairon, among many others, exhibited in the Rojas gallery.
From 1989 to 1996, in charge of curating the Rojas gallery, he promoted an exhibition space that, in a short time, established itself as the expression of an emblematic and complex cultural movement in the history of Argentine art. Among many other exhibitions, she was in charge of Frenesí (1994), a retrospective of the work of Liliana Maresca, at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, and Pereira-Vecino (2003), at the MALBA.
He participated in numerous individual and group exhibitions. She obtained the 2002 Konex Award, diploma of merit (Objects) in Visual Arts. For personal reasons, she decided to distance herself from artistic production and the field of art, for a period of almost seven years.
As an artist, in his work he challenged the limits of abstraction with decorative elements and popular culture. Organized into seven thematic cores, the exhibition includes paintings, collages and drawings that the artist made under the influence of avant-garde movements such as surrealism and artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Libero Badii and René Magritte. You can also see works whose protagonists are male figures, which recover aspects of the metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico and Lino Enea Spilimbergo. “During the 80s, Gumier Maier was weaving a plot that linked plastic creation, theatrical and performative acting, the production of sets and costumes, art criticism, the writing of essays on the gender-sexual issue and activism within of the homosexual movement,” writes the curator. The exhibition is complemented by photographs, posters and publications that document her outstanding participation in the Buenos Aires underground scene, as well as some of her art criticism and other writings in magazines of the time.
There is a sensual seal in many of the works. A series of portraits condenses her loves. A man with long hair, a bare torso and white pants, rests on a red armchair. There is a painting in tempera on stage paper that was presented in the first individual exhibition that she held in 1982 at Café Einstein, a pioneering space of the local underground. The images of Rodolfo, Lucho, Alexos, Juan Pablo and Riky follow one another. Sensual, they rest or are abstracted. This is how Gumier looked at them.
From the margins. Gumier Maier in the 80s can be visited until March 3 in the rooms on the first floor, from Tuesday to Friday, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on Saturdays and Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., with free admission. National Museum of Fine Arts, Av. del Libertador 1473.
2024-02-11 01:57:22
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