Luz Lizarazo
Cicatrices (2021)
August 2021 - Feb 2022
MAMBO - Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá, Colombia
Cicatrices [Scars] is the first institutional exhibition ever devoted to Luz Lizarazo's multifaceted oeuvre. A selection of her most representative works, developed over the last fifteen years, is displayed beside new pieces specially conceived for this exhibition.
Throughout her multi-decade career, Lizarazo’s poetic and political artwork has developed a distinctive visual language that confronts the systemic subjugation of the female voice and body, creating a space that recognizes and celebrates female autonomy, sexuality, and liberation.
Lizarazo's artistic practice employs a heterogeneous, unconventional, range of materials, such as glass, clay, wood, bones, wool, human hair, and dramatically varying scales—from monumental to fragmental.
The exhibition is thematically conceived to guide the visitor through Lizarazo's enchanted world by discovering her main abjections and fetishes, passions and obsessions, which inhabit her drawings, watercolors, paintings, sculptures, embroideries, and environmental installations.
The series El mundo intermedio [The Intermediate World] (2019) is displayed with a selection of Animales de poder [Animals of Power] (2017-2019). In these two series of drawings and watercolors, Lizarazo uses an enchanted, fairy-tale tone to question the shattered traumas of a dispersed femininity and its association with the animal force: the bird woman, the wolf, the deer, the spider, the butterfly. Lizarazo shifts from mythology to essential notions of womanhood into more complex narratives of violence, subjectivity, and liberation.
In Gabinete de curiosidades [Wunderkammern] is a selection of glass and ceramic sculptures, jewels, ex-votos, and newly found objects are exhibited in cabinets, among others borrowed from the artist's studio, to emphasize entering the artist’s intimate yet private space. The display of the pieces evokes a contemporary interpretation of a Wunderkammer, the traditional cabinet of curiosities conceived to arouse visitors' wonder.
In her series Piel [Skin] (2018-2021), the artist used veiled female tights as a metonymy of human skin.
In Taxidermia [Taxidermy] (2018) and Piel Extendida [Extended Skin] (2021) Lizarazo stretches, embroiders, and shapes this intimate indument that becomes a metaphor for constructing and deconstructing female identity as an object of attraction and desire, of separating inside and outside, veiling and unveiling.
Universo [Universe] (2021) is one of the new works conceived for this exhibition: a fragile glass garden is protected by a monumental mosquito net composed of multiple layers and colors, and embroidered by the artist. In this piece, as in her expressive vocabulary, Lizarazo transforms everyday and ordinary objects with a disturbing and provocative meaning.
The domestic sphere appears as a recurring theme in her work, as handcrafts traditionally associated with women, such as sewing or weaving. Yet Lizarazo's work, paradoxically, is not "feminine" in the stereotypical sense of the term. On the contrary, it can
be confrontational by involving the viewer in conflicting feelings of desire and repulsion, fear and fascination.
