artnexus #102

In her work, Sandra Gamarra (Lima, 1972) uses mechanisms taken from different art-world processes in order to reflect and create fiction about reality. She analyzes the policies that shape the archiving and registering of contemporary art and proposes a rereading of the specific relationships that are established between artist, artwork, exhibition site, and public. For example, her Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima project (Lima Museum of Contemporary Art) is an ironic rereading of the museum institution and its role in writing the history of art. Gamarra’s online museum, which opened in 2002, is a kind of portable institution established, as its presentation says, as a museum in motion that works in different spaces, with its base of operation in the city that hosts it temporarily, and seeks to mirror what a museum of contemporary art would look like in Lima. On its web page, in permanent construction, we read: “LiMac presents itself as a real museum via the different ways real museums arrive in Lima—this is to say, through souvenirs, catalogs, and print materials.” Her preferred self-definition as a painter rather than as an artist—the latter being a label she deems excessively broad—has driven Gamarra to develop a unique pictorial practice where collage plays a central role. She traces a connection between collage and hybridization, understood as “the seepage of the impure into the pure… That is why I make a parallel between collage, ready-mades, and the most subversive practices, and connect it with the past. In that way, I create not only a game where the hybrid is just a product, but one where those histories are unified.”(*) Her research into that special way of appropriating images allows Gamarra to recycle them, investigate their origins, and incorporate photographs, reproductions that appeared in various publications and the work of other artists. Such is the case of the work on our cover, where Gamarra approaches the topic of Western landscape painting, a genre that ultimately produced a peculiar, distorted relationship with nature. 
 * Perú 21, June 10th, 2015. 

IVONNE PINI