It is both a refuge and a journey through time. Enter the exhibition “There will be none like it”, about the work of Edgardo Giménez which is presented in MALBA until November 13implies reliving the magic of the Di Tella generation and the creative explosion that were the 60s and 70s in local art. Also, go through Giménez’s vast career to the present day, a disruptive artist who enriches his creations with a web of disciplines such as advertising, design and humor. Although it is not a retrospective, the exhibition invites you to immerse yourself in memorable icons such as the “secretaire” cats, the armchair he designed for Romero Brest or the most recent monkeys.
In this sense, it is a route that generates smiles and that attracts a very heterogeneous audience. “The most original thing I have is that I don’t tune into the nightmare, but rather the good humor and the desire to live. And that is striking at a time when the world, our country included, is so turbulent. I bet on joy, because, as Tita Merello said, life is short, and spending it on lime tea, worried and stylized, seems atrocious to me,” describes Giménez himself, who assures that he fulfilled his mission of “infecting and attuning a different wave.”
The spaces of your career
The exhibition is curated by María José Herrera, art critic and historian who has already worked with him on two other exhibitions and has been his faithful companion for two decades. It is not a retrospective but an anthology, and it could be said that the order is given by concepts.
Thus, in a room, jungle animals, where, for example, you can see a tapestry of a frog, an oil painting of Cupid among fauna or a sculpture of a grasshopper. In a space where clouds dominate, you can see the stone furniture, where a rock is the central sculptural element of a piece that simulates a sky and is crowned with a luminous rainbow. Also striking is the work “Federico Klemm”, a corporeal portrait of this vital figure of Argentine culture, with whom Giménez was very close.
Another room is the reconstruction of a room that the artist designed in the house of Rosemary Brest, completely wrapped in mirrors (and therefore one of the most photographed spaces in the exhibition in times of ubiquitous selfies). Here, the homeowner’s large, polka dot armchair is the protagonist and came back to life, reupholstered for this occasion. Around it, the space was completed with the installation “It’s love, it’s love that makes the world go round”, in which the rabbit from “Alice in Wonderland” is inside a cup; and with one of their classic cat secrets in a white version.
What follows is one of the most impressive parts of the exhibition. In his long career, Giménez also had time to design sets, and one of the most memorable has been recreated. It is the room of the false psychiatrist protagonist of “The Neurotics” (played by Norman Briski in 1971), a deceitful professional who offered group therapy to patients with sexual traumas in search of conquering the women who attended. Gímenez’s wonderful mind created for this plot a giant egg filled with smaller eggs and a hammock, which is accessed by a multicolored slide. This ingenuity earned the artist the Award for Best Scenography from the Association of Cinematographic Chroniclers, and in this 2023 recreation he comes to life again every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday with different performances.
The space below is almost entirely white. Here the monkeys stand out (in the beginning they were males, today they are females), icons of the artist’s work. The first time they appeared in his history was in the poster he made for the exhibition “Arte 67” at the Nordiska gallery. Later, this animal would spread through paintings, sculptures and stage designs of it. Made of aluminum, polychrome wood or ceramic, they are a central figure in his universe, in which joy is a fundamental point, and which coincides because “monkeys make monkeys!”
Finally, the set design of the film “Psexoanalysis” comes to life in the last room. And where Libertad Leblanc used to appear, today the drag queen Vedette performs once a week, performing “lip singing” with a special playlist. In the same room, the model of Casa Neptuna is presented, one of the most recent projects that Giménez carried out for the Ama Amoedo Foundation in Uruguay, and done completely remotely during the pandemic.
Through time
The tour would not be complete without a timeline that illuminates the creative power of the artist. And that, although it does not manage to cover all of his creative acuity, it traces a path from that 8-year-old boy who dazzled making the window of his neighborhood hardware store with crepe paper, to being one of the icons of Argentine pop art, recognized internationally. It reflects his years in advertising, his habitable works, his interior design and industrial design works, his memorable sets, the different influences on his art.
“Romero Brest commissioned me to build La Casa Azul when I had never built a house. And I created it, the critic Pierre Restany made a note and it reached the people of MoMA, who ended up including me in an exhibition on transformations in modern architecture, not being an architect myself. I had not done set design either and I received the award in a compilation of 10 years of Argentine cinema. Things were happening to me, I feel like I have a lucky horoscope,” he analyzes. Although in addition to fortune, he has work in his assets. To this day it continues to produce, so there will surely be more samples to visit. “I am in a permanent creative state, because the least difficult thing for me is to imagine.”
Image gallery
