Hear
The object was titled the collective exhibition that caused a scandal in 1966, at the Vignes gallery. Oscar Bony presented with a huge penis made of polyester and Julio Llinás, its director, refused to exhibit it. The other participating artists –Antonio Berni, Pablo Suarez and Emilio Renart– they considered that it was censorship and they decided to withdraw their works.
“The exhibition closed the same day it was inaugurated,” recalls Patricia Rizzo. in the catalog of an exhibition dedicated to him by the National Museum of Fine Arts in 1998. The object was located in a garden in Belgrano R, part of a house that Enrique Barilari provided on loan. Disagreeing with the location, One night the neighbors set the building on fire”.
The gallerist, Rizzo adds, nevertheless invited Bony to hold a solo show almost immediately. She then displayed an advertising poster that she had painted on sheet metal, with the word “Erotic”similar to that Cosmocosa sold last year in arteba. In this edition of the fair, they also invited the group urban tributes -made up of Alejandro Giorgga and Melisa Boratyn- to intervene in the surroundings of the Costa Salguero Center with stickers that reproduced what the artist called “semantic exercise”. “It went from the representation of the object to the word, to the conceptual,” they remember Amparo and Teo Discolico-directors of said gallery, who has been working since then with Carola Bony to represent his father’s legacy.
The same one that would arrive at collections from Malba and the Museum of Modern Art in New York with the registration of The working familya work with which he participated in the Experiences ’68 from the Di Tella Institute and that sparked another controversy. So, Instead of an artificial penis, he displayed a real family. A sign at the edge of the stage where they sat for hours indicated that the artist paid his models twice the amount their father earned for equivalent time in his usual job. He was questioned, among other things, for displaying people as if they were “museum objects.”.
What will happen next Thursday, when Cosmocosa presents at its headquarters in Recoleta eight works by Bony made since 1993, which have not been shown for more than two decades? There is, for example, arrows stuck on a torso, a window with glass broken by gunshots and another lead surface with bullet holes that remind us of the buchi of Lucio Fontana, like those of the Rosario’s work sold in May for 22.9 million dollars. Also a butterfly kept in a boxalong with a plaque engraved with the quote that gives the exhibition its title: “Thought is a producer of matter”.
The exhibition also includes three works that were exhibited in the exhibition that Malba dedicated to him between 2007 and 2008: mystical lamb (1998), from the series The triumph of deathand his latest works: two ovals framed with broken glass from gunshots. The latter include within various materials, including urineand were left outdoors so that nature could also contribute its own, as a tribute to Alberto Greco.
“These pieces explore matter and perhaps flirt with a recovery of material informalism and destructive art as images of representation, with Fontana and Greco as references – explains Amparo Díscoli –, offering a unique and revealing look at Bony’s creative process. They manifest the the artist’s concern about ethics and the need of contemporary man to regain contact with the transcendent and the spiritual in a decade marked by consumerism and ‘light art’”.
Of Light, to Canada. It will surely be another show to remember.
Thought is a producer of matter, an exhibition by Oscar Bony at Cosmocosa (Montevideo 1430, PB), from Thursday, June 27 to July 31. Monday to Friday from 2 to 7 p.m., with free admission.
