CURATORS’ SERIES #6: FRIENDS OF LONDON.
ARTISTS FROM LATIN AMERICA IN LONDON FROM
196X – 197X’
07.06.2013 – 03.08.2013
Opening Reception:
Thursday, 06.06.2013, 6.30 – 9 pm
David Lamelas, London Friends, 1974. Courtesy of the Artist, Jan MotBrussels/Mexico and Sprueth Magers Berlin London.
CURATORS’ SERIES #6
Friends of London. Artists from Latin America in London from 196X
– 197X
Curated by Pablo León de la Barra with Carmen Juliá
Pablo León de la Barra is the sixth guest curator invited by DRAF to be part of the
Curators' Series. ‘Friends of London. Artists from Latin America in London 196X-197X’
will explore the vivid, but rarely researched, Latin American art scene in London in the
60s and 70s. The title of the exhibition is based on a work by Argentinean artist David
Lamelas, ‘London Friends’ 1974. Lamelas invited a number of friends to be photographed,
thereby creating a remarkable image of the London scene at the time. The pictures were
taken by a photographer who worked primarily in fashion and, as a result, the subjects
took on glamorous poses. The images are at once fashion photography and personal
portraits. They include pictures of the artist Marcel Broodthaers and his wife, London
gallery owner Nigel Greenwood, curator and writer Lynda Morris (who played the leading
character in Lamelas’s seminal work ‘Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning)’ in 1972),
and Kamala Di Tella from the Di Tella family, who initiated the Center for Visual Arts of
the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires, the foremost avant-garde cultural institution in
Latin America during the 1960s.
‘Friends of London’ at DRAF takes its lead from this work and offers the opportunity to
engage with a particular social and artistic scene established in London throughout the
60s and 70s. This exhibition focuses on London as an instrumental destination for artists
from Latin America, whose work has previously been examined in the context of their
native countries, or in relation to contemporaneous North American works. Through the
display of artworks, letters, documents, interviews and publishing projects, the exhibition
aims to contextualise the incredibly fertile and symbiotic relationship established
between these artists, some political exiles, and their new London environment.
Leaving to one side ideas of nationality and regionalism, this exhibition focuses on
London as a place of freedom and experimentation that enabled artists to produce radical
works that engaged with issues of participation and collaboration, established new
relationships with the public space and fostered art as an effective political tool.
Artists: Diego Barboza, Ulises Carrión, Felipe Ehrenberg, Marta Hellion, David Lamelas,
Leopoldo Maler, Hélio Oiticica, Cecilia Vicuña, Beau Geste Press and Artists for
Democracy.
The exhibition is supported by the Mexican Embassy, London
The David Roberts Art Foundation Limited is a registered charity in England and Wales (No. 1119738) and a company
limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (No. 6051439) at 4th Floor Adam House, 1 Fitzroy Square London,
W1T 5HE. It is proudly supported by the Edinburgh House Estates group of companies.
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ARTISTS:
DAVID LAMELAS (b. 1946, Buenos Aires) was a key figure in the emergence of
international conceptual art in the late 1960s. Originally a sculptor, he became an
innovative film artist. Lamelas’s work from this period analyses art as a means of
communication, relating it to how information is conveyed by such media as the
newspaper, radio and television. In light of the current discussion on the relationship
between art and the entertainment industry, his critique of the passive role imposed on
the public by the mass media is particularly topical. His search for new ways of making
and presenting art brought him from Argentina to Europe, where he has maintained close
ties with artists such as Marcel Broodthaers and Daniel Buren, and finally to the United
States, where he has made the film and television industry the theme and context of his
work.
DIEGO BARBOZA (1945 - 2003) was a Venezuelan painter and performance artist. He
studied painting at the Escuela de Artes Plasticas in Maracaibo and at the Escuela de
Artes Plasticas in Caracas. During the sixties and seventies, Barboza worked in London
and Paris, where he performed his acontecimientos (events) or acciones poéticas (poetic
actions) on streets and in parks; these were a form of Happenings that stressed the poetic
with festive elements and had no social content. Participation of the viewer was a main
aim of his practice: trying to bring the art of museums into the street.
LEOPOLDO MALER (b. 1937, Buenos Aires) moved to London in 1961 where he started to
experiment with new ideas about mixed media, integrating films into sculptures and
installations. Maler has developed his entire work commuting between his city of birth,
England, the Dominican Republic, and several cities in the United States. He has
represented his homeland at the Sao Paulo and Venice Biennials, has received a
Guggenheim Fellowship, and has presented his works in world-class venues such as the
Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Whitechapel Gallery and the Hayward Gallery in
London.
HELIO OITICICA (1937 – 1980) was a Brazillian visual artist best known for his
participation in the Concrete Group, for his innovative use of paint, and for what he later
termed "eco-friendly art". He is well known for his installation works and sculptures that
invite the spectator to participate and actively use what he had created.
CECILIA VICUÑA (b.1947, Santiago de Chile) is a poet, artist and political activist. She
creates installations in nature, cities and museums. Her work begins as an image, poem
or line and transforms into impermanent, ‘precarious’ films, installations, sculptures or
performances. The works are unannounced and disappear, leaving no trace. She cofounded Artist’s for Democracy, aiming to support artists fighting for liberation.
FELIPE EHRENBERG (b.1943, Mexico City) is recognized as one of the most provocative
artists in Latin America. His works comprise of painting, sculpture, graphics,
environmental art and performance. He is often known for his work created in connection
with the Fluxus movement of the 60’s and 70’s. This volume of work contains prints,
booklets and altered photographs among a variety of mostly flat media and performances.
He also co-founded BEAU GESTE PRESS during this time. It was whilst in self-exile in
England in the mid 70’s, due to political issues in Mexico that Ehrenberg began to
experiment with boxes, which continue to turn up in his works.
MARTHA HELLION (b.1937, México) is a Mexican visual artist and freelance curator. She
The David Roberts Art Foundation Limited is a registered charity in England and Wales (No. 1119738) and a company
limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (No. 6051439) at 4th Floor Adam House, 1 Fitzroy Square London,
W1T 5HE. It is proudly supported by the Edinburgh House Estates group of companies.
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is also the founder of the Center for Research and Documentation on Artists Books in
Mexico City. In 2004 she published a history of artist’s books from Latin America. This
book explores how artists have used books to express their experiences and attitudes
towards political upheaval in various Latin American countries and around the world.
Founded by Guy Brett, John Dugger, David Medalla and Cecila Vicuña among others in
1974, ARTISTS FOR DEMOCRACY aimed to oppose dictatorships in the third world by
providing cultural support to movements for liberation throughout the world. Vicuna
herself was exiled from Chile in the early 1970’s due to her support for the murdered
president Salvador Allende.
ULISES CARRION (1941 - 1989) was a Mexican artist and writer. He gained a scholarship
to study language and literature in Leeds in 1972. Here, he discovered the work of the
Beau Geste Press, which inspired him to embark upon his own self-publishing projects.
Later that year, Carrión moved to Amsterdam where he produced a wide variety of works
that employed almost all the forms of distribution from the late 1960s and 70s: books,
films, radio shows, print editions, mail art, conferences and talks and festivals. His work
challenged the notion of singular authorship through emphasis on collaborative projects.
In 1975 he opened Other Books & Co, a bookshop that specialised in the production of
artist’s books, an archive and an exhibition space where artists exchanged ideas, where
performances took place and where lectures and events would take shape spontaneously.
Carrión’s time in London had a profound influence on his transition from writer to artist,
and further enabled the production and distribution of his artists’ books.
NOTES TO EDITORS
The David Roberts Art Foundation Limited is a registered charity in England and Wales (No. 1119738) and a company
limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (No. 6051439) at 4th Floor Adam House, 1 Fitzroy Square London,
W1T 5HE. It is proudly supported by the Edinburgh House Estates group of companies.
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About Pablo León de la Barra
Pablo León de la Barra is an independent curator, exhibition maker, researcher and
cultural producer born in Mexico City in 1972. León de la Barra has a PhD in History and
Theory from the Architectural Association, London. He has curated among other
exhibitions ‘To Be Political it Has to Look Nice’ (2003) at apexart and Art in General in
New York; ‘PR04 Biennale’ (2004 co-curator) MM Proyectos, Puerto Rico; ‘George and
Dragon at ICA’ (2005) at ICA, London; ‘Glory Hole’ (2006) at the Architecture
Foundation, London; Sueño de Casa Propia (2007-2008 with Maria Ines Rodriguez) at
Centre de Art Contemporaine-Geneve, Casa Encendida-Madrid, Casa del Lago-Mexico
City; ‘This Is Not America’ (2009) at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico; ‘El Noa Noa’ in
Bogota, Colombia (2009); ‘Somewhere Under the Rainbow’ (2010), San Juan, Puerto
Rico; ‘Tristes Tropiques’ (2010) at The Barber Shop in Lisbon; ‘Incidents of Travel in
Central America, Chiapas, Yucatan and Elsewhere’ (2010), at the CCE, Guatemala (2010);
‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, Cerith Wyn Evans at Casa Barragan, Mexico City (2010);
‘Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere’ (2011), Museo Tamayo, Mexico
City; ‘Bananas is my Business: The South American Way’, Museu Carmen Miranda
(2011), Rio de Janeiro; ‘Microclimas’, Kunsthalle Zurich (2012); ‘Esquemas para una Oda
Tropical’, Rio de Janeiro (2012); ‘Marta “Che” Traba’, Museo La Ene, Buenos Aires
(2012). León de la Barra has written amongst other publications for Frog/Paris,
PinUp/New York, Purple/Paris, Spike/Austria, Wallpaper/London, Celeste/Mexico,
Tomo/Mexico, Rufino/Mexico, Ramona/Buenos Aires, Arte al Dia/Miami, Metropolis
M/Amsterdam, Numero Cero/Puerto Rico, Tar/Italy, as well as catalogue texts for
numerous artists and curators.
About Carmen Juliá
Carmen Juliá has been Assistant Curator at Tate since 2008. She currently works on the
acquisition of Contemporary British Art, as well as Latin American art from 1950. She has
curated numerous collection displays, including: Gallery One; New Vision Centre, Signals
and Indica; Gerard Byrne 1984 and Beyond and Melanie Smith Six Steps to Abstraction.
She has curated exhibitions such as Art Now: Jess Flood-Paddock, and she is currently
working on the next Tate Britain Commission with Simon Starling. Juliá holds an MA in
Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art (2004-2005). Before joining
Tate, she was Assistant Director at Blow de la Barra Gallery, London, and previous
curatorial projects include: Case Study: Julio Plaza. Transnational networks of exchange
at Five Years, London 2012; and Jonas Mekas: He Stands in a Desert Counting the
Seconds of His Life, at Museo Tamayo, Mexico 2006. Previously, she worked as a
researcher at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. She has contributed to magazines
such as Tate Etc., ArtNexus and El País, and has written for many catalogues and
publications, including Carmen Herrera at Ikon, Birmingham.
David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF) is an independent, non-profit foundation
founded in 2007. It is directed and curated by Vincent Honoré, former curator at Palais
de Tokyo, Paris and Tate Modern, London. DRAF seeks to develop an ambitious,
international and often collaborative programme of contemporary art exhibitions,
commissions, live art events, discussions and projects. The core of its activity is to
question the nature of the exhibition as a medium, and to provide its audience with the
opportunity to experience diverse curatorial and critical visions. Having operated in
Fitzrovia for the past four years, DRAF has moved to a renovated, 19th century furniture
factory in Mornington Crescent in September 2012. With a larger and more flexible
exhibition space measuring approximately 475sqm, DRAF is a meeting point and an
The David Roberts Art Foundation Limited is a registered charity in England and Wales (No. 1119738) and a company
limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (No. 6051439) at 4th Floor Adam House, 1 Fitzroy Square London,
W1T 5HE. It is proudly supported by the Edinburgh House Estates group of companies.
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evolving resource for both the art and local communities. Creating a platform for
collaborations, DRAF will continue its commitment to produce, share and disseminate
knowledge.
Address
Symes Mews/37 Camden High Street
London, NW1 7JE
info@davidrobertsartfoundation.com
+44 (0) 207 383 3004
www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com
Press Contact
info@advidrobertsartfoundation.com
+44 (0) 207 383 3004
The David Roberts Art Foundation Limited is a registered charity in England and Wales (No. 1119738) and a company
limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (No. 6051439) at 4th Floor Adam House, 1 Fitzroy Square London,
W1T 5HE. It is proudly supported by the Edinburgh House Estates group of companies.
Page 6 of 6