The exhibition “To the Front Line” once again confirms the talent of Diana Dowek (Buenos Aires, 1942), directing her gaze and her work towards social tears and individual loneliness. They are pieces that reflect the heroic task of health workers during the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, carried out during the isolation of 2020 and 2021. The eight large paintings and an installation -projection on a stretcher of words established during the crisis sanitary- summarize one of your wishes. Dowek wants her contemporaries to find in her works “a moment in their collective lives.” The Pavilion of Fine Arts of the UCA opened its doors with this shocking exhibition, curated by Cecilia Cavanagh and Dardo Fabián Flores, with text by José Emilio Burucua.
Entering the third year of the pandemic -on March 3, 2020, the so-called zero case of Covid-19 arrived in the country-, Dowek offers the opportunity to remember, to review images that now seem very distant, especially when streets, parks, cafes They overflow with people at all hours. An example of ethical and aesthetic coherence, the artist persists in questioning the events of this time. Her painting manages to make one think, reflect silences and gestures. They transmit moments and feelings of those who, overwhelmed and bewildered, fought for the lives of others putting their own at risk, became desperate, hugged each other, exhausted themselves. They deal once again with people the artist admires, but here the doctors and nurses are anonymous, applauded by many and vilified by few (shame, neighbors wanted to kick them out of their homes). Multi-awarded, Dowek made her first solo show in 1967. She has just returned from Malaga, where she presented paintings at the Benalmadena Exhibition Center, about “La Desbanda. The crime of the highway from Malaga to Almería” fascist bombardment of the civilian population in February 1937, before Guernica immortalized by Picasso.
