PRINTMAKING: MADE IN CHILE

About the curator

• Justo Pastor Mellado (Concepción, 1949) Art critic and independent curator. Since 1980, he has devoted his critical work to addressing the relationships of transference and filiation in contemporary Chilean and Latin American art. He has curated shipments of Chilean art to the biennials of Sao Paulo, Venice, Mercosur, Lima, Buenos Aires and Poligráfica de Puerto Rico. He has been director of Escuela de Arte de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, of the Escuela de Artes Visuales y Fotografía de la Universidad UNIACC, of the Parque Cultural de Valparaíso and Centro de Estudios de Arte (CeDA). Currently, he is a cultural attaché at the Chilean Embassy in France.

About the artists

• Carlos Hermosilla (Valparaíso, 1905 – Viña del Mar, 1991). Illustrator and printmaker, he trained several generations of artists at the Municipal School of Fine Arts in Viña del Mar and at the the Municipal School of Fine Arts in Valparaíso. He entered the School of Fine Arts at Universidad de Chile (1930), where he began to develop his talent under the mentorship of the artist Ana Cortés. In the 1930s, he developed an extensive publishing activity, promoting the publication of poets from Valparaíso, to whom he provided xylographic illustrations for their editions. That was the beginning of his relations with the world of books, mainly linked to the edition of some master books by Pablo de Rokha. He developed his teaching activity in Valparaíso and was a recognized communist militant. In the 70s, he was declared “artist of the people” by the Institute of Latin American Art.
• Eduardo Vilches (Concepción, 1932). 2019 Visual Arts National Award. He started out as an autodidact and shortly after moving to Santiago he was invited by the artist Nemesio Antúnez to join Taller 99 that he directed. Without formal studies, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to deepen his knowledge of art at Yale University (United States). He began teaching at the School of Art at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he created the Advanced Color and History of Printmaking courses and planned the drawing and printmaking workshops, which meant a contribution to the transformation of the teaching of visual arts and what critics call “printmaking displacements”, a fundamental aspect in the reflections of contemporary art.
• Virginia Errázuriz (Santiago, 1941). She joined the School of Fine Arts at Universidad de Chile in 1961, where she took her first graphic steps in the legendary printmaking Workshop held by Eduardo Martínez Bonati. She was a member and permanent collaborator of the Visual Arts Workshop (T.A.V.), a space founded together with her husband, the artist Francisco Brugnoli, for artistic development and reflection in the midst of the dictatorship. She was a scholar at Universidad de Chile and Universidad Arcis. There were two moments when she was at risk of being disciplined within the Chilean art scene in her career: in the mid-1960s, with the production of the series Objetos de Trapo (using the rhetoric of counterfeit dressmaking), and In the early 1980s, when she produced the small series Made in Chile, exemplary neat engravings that are at the origin of the title of this exhibition.
• Virginia Vizcaíno (Los Andes, 1945). Trained at the Schools of Fine Arts in Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, she specialized in lithography at Taller 99 and at the Tamarind Institute (United States). Her work mixes figuration and abstraction, with a predominance of the experimental and expansive character of printmaking, superimposing matrices and textures displayed in large formats. She is representative of the particular history of the graphic arts in Valparaíso and contributed to the reopening of the Printmaking Workshop of the School of Fine Arts in that city – closed after the coup in 1973 -, where she was director and scholar, training several generations of graphic artists from the port cities.
• Lorena Villablanca (Chillán, 1969). She studied a Bachelor of Education, Mention in Plastic Arts at Universidad de Concepción and a Bachelor of Art, Mention in Painting and Printmaking at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Santiago de Chile. She was part of a generation of young artists who were acknowledged in the democratic reopening phase, thinking about the possibility of confronting the control of Santiago of accessibilities and resources, through the development of a local image linked to the formal traditions of oral literature and pottery. Lorena Villablanca has persisted in her research, consolidating a work that combines references to Lira Popular (Popular Lire), medieval illustrations of animals, press photographs, classical mythology and pottery from Quinchamalí.
• Beatriz Leyton (Punta Arenas, 1950). Entered the School of Fine Arts of Universidad de Chile in 1971, switching to Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1973. She was a member of T.A.V. and Taller 99. She carries out wood engravings and experimental techniques with a critical and nostalgic gaze at everyday and urban life, always seeking for the formal synthesis in the image. She has been a scholar for a long time at the School of Art of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile from 1997 to 2019
• Daniel Lagos Ramírez (Castro, 1976). Visual artist and researcher, printmaking specialist. He studied at Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, where he currently is a scholar, and studied with the famous Colombian artist Alfonso Álvarez at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá. His creative work has always been intertwined with research on the history of printmaking, which seeks to make visible the local production of different national territories that have relevant, but barely disseminated, collections in the texts of history and theory of art in Chile. Likewise, he has developed dissemination projects and printmaking workshops for children from rural sectors in the Vicún commune and in different schools in Temuco, among other areas. Part of this experience has been the Cherkán Workshop, whose students Francisca Flores Loncon, Ana María Millanao Calluqueo, Francisco Sanzana Curihuil, Gabriel Terán Huencho, Pascal Calfiñir, Arnoldo Nahuellán Quilamán and Héctor Millanco Calluqueo exhibit together with Daniel Lagos in the present exhibition.

School of Visual Arts and Photography of  Universidad UNIACC