Photos: Juan Pablo Murrugarra, Sebastian Schobbert
An ear from a hand from a blotch from a dress
Text by Miguel A. López, 2022
Tania Bedriñana has painted hair, skin, heads, fluids, arms, eyes, and tongues, all of which act as bridges between different places and times. Like a wizard or an alchemist, she turns a series of simple materials (paper, fabric, cardboard, pigments, and emulsions) into soft anatomies and fragmented bodies that occupy spaces as if new life had been breathed into them. Their physiognomies are simultaneously inside and outside. A mask that is a dress that is a blotch that is a hand that is a leaf that is an ear.
Her paintings, pottery, pencil drawings, cut-outs, and assemblages may seem at first glance like melancholy intimist landscapes, but one must look again—or cease to look only with the eyes. There is something uncertain and magnetic in her way of representing things, as if her lines were open questions about how our bodies make themselves visible and hide themselves in the world. Bedriñana’s works do not offer us soothing, tranquil spaces. Quite the opposite— they introduce us into a turbulent voyage where we find ourselves unpacking questions long concealed in the hidden corners where our worries and anxieties lie buried. The artist even leads us to doubt our own images of ourselves, as if the habitual representations of our faces—especially those taken from photographs— were nothing more than a fiction, a piece of theater. In response to that, the artist seems to assert that the task of painting is precisely to make space for and restore those uncomfortable sensations: to make our strange borders speak. read more ❯
Butterfly Wings: The Fragile Subversion of Tania Bedriñana
Text by Florencia Portocarrero, 2022
Butterfly Wings is an “expanded painting” installation, presented by artist Tania Bedriñana as her graduation project at Kunsthochschule Kassel (Kassel School of Visual Arts) in 2002, which now – twenty years to the day – can be seen at The Dress Backwards, an exhibition curated by Miguel A. López that revisits her production through a perspective that focuses in body representation and kinship.
Butterfly wings inaugurated several of the topics and formal strategies that distinguish Bedriñana’s work today and can be read from the present as a critical pointing towards the heteropatriarchal imaginary that dominates the local pictorial tradition. In fact, since early in her formation at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru’s Faculty of Arts, Bedriñana refused to align her work with a methodology that demanded an acritical reproduction of a modernist and masculine sensibility –where enunciative seriousness and a maturity of the visual repertories, as well as a technical excellence based in a hierarchy and non-contamination between the different artistic disciplines – set the boundaries that made painting valuable and intelligible. In the opposite spectrum, Bedriñana had a fixation with representing the body – more importantly the female body – by resorting to precarious materialities and techniques associated with the domestic and infantile such as drawing, watercolors and paper cutting. For years, Bedriñana regarded this repertoire of images as sketches that would sooner or later become something more, or even a personal obsession that it was pointless to make public. However, her encounter with German academia – which encouraged its students to seek and develop a personal formal language by means of interdisciplinary experimentation – gave her the push she needed to dive into her interests and the interstices that appear while working at the limits of what is traditionally regarded as painting. read more ❯