Bow Down: To Cecilia Vicuña
by Niamh McCooey
This coming weekend, New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery will open La India Contaminada, the gallery’s inaugural Cecilia Vicuña retrospective. While the Chilean-born artist has lived in New York and exhibited widely both in the US and abroad for over three decades, this is the first comprehensive survey of her work to be held in New York.
The exhibition will feature Vicuña’s notable raw wool installation and sculpture known as Quipu. Presented alongside her mixed-media sculptures referred to as Lo Precario, this work will also be accompanied by video, and painting, spanning 1969-2017. La India Contaminada will run in tandem with a solo exhibition of her Disappeared Quipu at the Brooklyn Museum, opening May 18th, with her early performance and photographic work also included in the museum’s exhibition, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985.
Vicuña’s Quipu works reinvent the ancient Andean system that recorded stories through the knotting of coloured thread. Historically, the quipu has been regarded as a simple bureaucratic device, but research demonstrates that in fact they represented a complex system of knowledge intrinsic to Andean communities. In light of this connectivity, Vicuña views her Quipus not only as sculptures, but as poems in space.
La India Contaminada, 19 May - 6 July, 2018
Lehmann Maupin, 536 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011