Marcelo Grosman (Buenos Aires, 1959) was the creator and director of the editions of Open Studio who revitalized the visual arts scene in the city, director of the Buenos Aires festivals, co-director of the Urban Thought Meetings and was currently in charge of communication at the Teatro Colón.
Grosman’s work is loaded with ideas about institutional practices and their effects on the body and image. He began working with a traditional approach to photography in the eighties, developing a series of portraits of young soldiers and naval officers, when the military theme was still painfully present given the recent end of the years of military dictatorship in Argentina.
He then went on to use the photographic medium in a different way, abandoning the capture of first-hand images and using found images instead. Your series Guilty They are large monochromatic prints that overlay the faces of convicted criminals.
Inscribed in the reflection about the body – its image -, the institutions of control, the loss of truth in the image (in favor of the idea of verisimilitude), Grosman’s work delves into a concept that he calls the process of optical capture . Initially originated around strategies linked to traditional photography, over time it incorporated a certain idea of theatricality, quasi-performative, where the work is completed with the viewer’s journey, through systems that destabilize and retrace the path of the objectivity of the camera, at the same time constructing new meanings.
The most recent evolution of his work consists of images produced with lenticular technologies that condense several seconds of footage taken from educational films from the mid-20th century, intended to teach about sexuality, personal hygiene, good posture or first aid. The images that are activated as the viewer walks past the work end up loaded with disturbing eroticism or becoming pseudo-abstract.
His work has had solo exhibitions at The Mission Projects, Chicago, USA; Municipale des Arts Gallery, Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia; The House of America, Madrid, Spain; Foster Catena Gallery, Buenos Aires and Recoleta Cultural Center, Buenos Aires.
Among the numerous group exhibitions that included his work are From the Cavern at the MOCA Cultural Center in 2008; The City and the River at Fundación Proa in 2006, and the V Porto Alegre Biennial. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (Museo Moderno); Musée de Charleroi, Belgium and many important private collections in Latin America, the United States and Europe.
