After several delays due to weather and political upheaval in Argentina, my exhibition at The Embassy of Argentina in Washington, DC opened on February 19th.
In spite of the record-breaking low temperatures of 4-5 degrees, we did have a good turnout for the Opening. The Argentine wine helped warm everyone’s fingers and toes allowing them to enjoy examples of our ex-pat Argentine artwork.
The exhibit, entitled “Hiraeth, is a showcase for both my work and that of my friend, Diana Gonzalez Gandolfi, a fellow Argentine expat and artist who also works with encaustic.
For more background on Hiraeth read here or read our statement at the end of this post.
I had never been to the Embassy before and was struck at how beautiful the building was, both inside and out.
The Washington Hispanic newspaper was at the opening and did an article about us which you can see below.
Below you can see a panoramic view of one side of the rotunda, the room where the exhibition was held.
Above, Diana Gonzales Gandolfi and me. Below, the curator, Alfredo Ratinoff and Maritza Gueler from the Embassy of Argentina Cultural Section.
More photos from the opening below.
About the exhibition
Hiraeth (heer”’-eyeth) Welsh.
(n.) A homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.
We came upon this word and thought it was the ideal title for our joint exhibition.
We first met one another five years ago at an International Encaustic Conference in Massachusetts. During conversations throughout the conference we discovered that we had grown up in remarkably similar ways. We have so many things in common. We were both born in the same hospital in Argentina, 11 days apart. Each of our families left Argentina while we were very young. We each had to leave behind all that was known to us…family, friends, school, home, language, food, and more. We each then grew up part of an international community that became our extended family. We live close to one another in the Northeast. And now we are both artists and we both work with encaustic. Although, to the eye, our finished work looks not at all alike, the process by which we get to an end is notably similar. We both like to structure our space with grids, we both use symbols and color as a subject matter and we both use pigmented wax (encaustic) as our medium. Working with encaustic paints involves the layering of images. This build-up of marks, shapes and colors results in surfaces with a history and aged quality that suits the subject matter of our work. The process reveals present realities and glimpses of memory.
doraficher.com
dianagonzalezgandolfi.com