Graciela Hasper – Galería Mun

No. 17. July – September 1995.

The recently inaugurated Galería Mun debuts the 1995 season with a solo show by Graciela Hasper. Strategically located in Bajo Retiro, the city spot where art galleries have historically been located, Pipele Salonia and Manu Froidevaux aim to run the gallery as an alternative space to show the work of artists from the nineties. This is the first of eight exhibitions of young painters planned for this year.

Hasper (1966) subtly discusses certain current aspects of the gender issue in art. With a precise brushstroke, trained during her time at the Antorchas workshop -directed by Guillermo Kuitca between 1991 and 1993-, Hasper incorporates details that allude to the stereotype of what is culturally associated with the feminine world. Without excesses or drama, her painting falls within the general guidelines of the nueva geometría (new geometry). Squares, circles, ovals and rhombuses are alternated in a series of flat works with a disturbing asepsis that is only broken by the strident use of a saturated and vibrant palette. The strangeness of the image is heightened by Hasper’s complex combination of colors. Pure and pastel colors are deliberately grouped together as in a make-up kit that masks the transvestite nature of the female condition. In a place between obsession and indifference, her painting reflects on the psychological situations linked to the construction of female subjectivity and the organization of domestic rituals in front of boudoir’s mirror. With a point of view that carries a hint of irony, Hasper alludes to the almost maniac traditions of the Western female, with her taste for pretentious ornamentation that disguises, behind that highly aestheticized public figure, a complaint that hides deep sadness. As in other artists of her generation, such as Siquier or Guagnini, there is an absolute simplicity of means that focuses on the decorative details of the image.

These representations are repeated in a series of references to the artist’s personal iconography, which include the memory of decoration and fashion from her seventies teenage years, the Japanese slippers bought in a neighborhood variety store, or the oval shape from the pills that the artist remembers from her father’s profession as a doctor and the pharmaceutical world. 

Between strictness and excess, Graciela Hasper offers another possible perspective on the question of gender in contemporary art, presenting the possibility of using humor to appropriate the features that constitute her personal way of conceiving femininity.

BY LAURA BATKIS