Julia San Martín solo show: Proyectos Proyectos Raúl Zamudio / Empty Circle NYC

Proyectos Proyectos Raúl Zamudio / Empty Circle NYC presents the solo exhibition Club Cementerio by Julia San Martin, curated by Raúl Zamudio, director of said space. It is a multimedia show that includes painting, drawing, video, sculpture, and textile interventions.

The artist began to develop the concept of “Club Cementerio” in 2020 amid COVID-19, riots, and social demonstrations in different parts of the world, especially in her native Chile, where she was at that time. Around the world, in an act of weariness, hundreds, perhaps thousands of monuments have been torn down; the hero, the explorer, the conqueror, the white and masculine victor, who swarms in history, in particular of Art (with capital A) suddenly lost its pedestal, and its head. It is almost unbelievable that it took hundreds of years to take a pair of ropes and throw them to the ground. That Club Cementerio of San Martín is made up of a whole context of daily and historical violence. In this way, the works that are part of the exhibition are scathing laughter from those who have experienced, in their own flesh, the systematic voracity of colonial and capitalist thought.

Julia San Martin has extensive knowledge of the history of Western art, the periods, the systems of representation, and the characters. She also has academic training in various traditional drawing and painting techniques; those skills “can make her as uncomfortable” as an acquired vice that is difficult to break. Like the majority of her work, the Empty Circle show is self-referential and consists mainly of self-portraits, heroines who make fun of themselves, of their social status, gender, or race. Structural violence on the body of non-white women is present in … Click here to read more