Paula Otegui
1974
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Buenos Aires, Argentina
6 Works exhibited on Kooness
Current location
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Represented by
Pabellón 4 Arte Contemporáneo
, Buenos Aires -
AR
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Works by Paula Otegui
The works of Paula Otegui are real battlefields. Not only because, literally, the artist often represents disputed human groups, submerged in more or less peaceful, more or less chaotic plastic territories, but mainly because other no less evident struggles take place in them: the eternal contest between the graphic and the pictorial, between the line and the stain, between the line and the color.
As a sounding board, Otegui spreads the tensions. With an impeccable technique, it superimposes figurative, abstract, geometric patterns, stains, creating a complex visual plot where the gaze becomes abysmal. For this, he uses a whole series of plastic resources, contained by a strict composition that avoids any dispersion.
The stylistic and technical solvency with which Paula Otegui supports her fascinating settings is remarkable; the expansive balance that she amalgamates them seems natural, without dissonant accents or inordinate resources. A certain flora, an unlikely geography, a rare figuration have grown on the canvas with the same opulent simplicity with which nature imposes its infinite forms on the real world. In this current, the iconographic factors of a botany that are closer to the invention of the marvelous tale than to scientific nomenclature, and of a landscape that is paradisiacal longing and arbitrary germination rather than referential
resonance, are interwoven and camouflaged. Here and there strange characters can be glimpsed, joyfully imbricated in these gardens of sketching delights, humidified by an atmosphere of hypnotic irradiation.
When we let ourselves be impregnated by it, we perceive that Otegui connects sensually, and offers us an equivalent intimacy according to the hedonism of doing and looking, with a secret complicit perversity. Candid little houses, streams and swamps that come out of the sweet fever experienced by some dazzled passerby while crossing her imaginary jungle utopia, coexist with perfectly extemporaneous spots and brushstrokes in the excess of it, to redefine the structural intonation of the entire composition.
When the optic of the piece is inverted, the background is then black, with the motifs cut out in a milky white and almost primordial, with a bony luminosity, like plankton, generating renewed restlessness in a scene that is as fabulous as it is spectral. At the same time, color, concentrated especially in those rhythmic circles and lunar spheres, also operates as a counterpoint factor and chromatic alteration, productively disturbing the tonal quality of the whole. With one foot on the most virtuous manga tradition, and a certain relationship with the Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist universe, plus a well understood and better resolved decorativeness and ornamentation, the artist constructs her anomalous greenhouse, fertile in foliage of uncertain origin, in clouds. , slime, specters, pelambres and branches, installed in a perpetual movement of tension and backwater, sinuosity and strictness, unleashed graphics and detailed precision, invariably fed by a dark and intoxicating sage.
Paula Otegui (Buenos Aires, 1974) Lives and works in Buenos Aires. She has a degree in Visual Arts (IUNA) / National Professor of Painting and Engraving (IUNA). Her work has been selected by various juries and she has participated in group exhibitions, among others: Horizonte Vazado: Latin American Artists at the Edge, Instituto Cervantes de San Pablo; National Hall of Painting Fundación Banco Nación de la Argentina, National House of the Bicentennial, Buenos Aires; Klemm Foundation Award, at the Klemm Foundation, Buenos Aires; El Cambio, Latin American and Caribbean Artists, World Bank Artists Program, Washington, Dean Jensen Gallery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; 50th Anniversary Exhibition of the National Arts Fund, Casa de la Cultura, Bs. As .; 25 years of democracy Show tribute. Pink House. Bs. As .; National Salon of Visual Arts, Palais de Glace. Bs. As .; Ibero American Painting Contest, Aerolineas Argentinas, MNBA Bs. As .; Bonifacio del Carril Stimulus Award, National Academy of Fine Arts, Borges Cultural Center. Bs. As. In 2015 she participates in the Beijing Biennial, representing Argentina, which is held at the National Museum of Art of China. Paula has obtained National Awards and distinctions, among others: First Prize National Biennial of Drawing Franklin Rawson San Juan Museum; Arco Madrid Fair Residence Grant at Casa de Velazquez, National Endowment for the Arts; First Prize in the Visual Arts Drawing and Painting Contest, FNA, Casa Victoria Ocampo. FNA Plastic Arts Grant; Mention Painting National Salon of Visual Arts, Palais de Glace; Cultural Equality Award, National House of the Bicentennial; First Prize Young Artist Banco Central de La República Argentina, MNBA, Bs. As .; Young Talent Grand Prize in the 3rd Edition of the UADE University Painting Prize, Metropolitan Museum, Bs. As .; 1st Prize for Positive Culture, Painting, Fundación Hupedes and Secretariat of Culture, Buenos Aires; 1st Prize Stimulus for Young Painters Hebraica 2007, Metropolitan Museum, Buenos Aires; Mention in the Painting category at the National Salon of Visual Arts, Palais de Glace, BA. As., Mention Itaú Cultural Award, among others. Recently (2013-2014) she has obtained the subsistence scholarship granted by the Pollock Krasner NY Foundation, the scholarship of the Metropolitan Fund of Arts and Sciences granted by the Ministry of Culture of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires. In 2015 she received the Grant for group projects and the 2015 National Plastic Arts Grant, both awarded by the National Fund for the Arts. Her works are part of institutional collections in Argentina: Central Bank of the Argentine Republic, Sociedad Hebraica, UADE University, Copime and Isev. And in other countries: National Museum of Art of China and Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University Milwaukee, USA. Also from private collections in Argentina, Paraguay, Spain, Colombia, USA, Italy, England.
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