12 April – 10 June Room Philip West. First Floor
Venus en el despeñadero (inspired by Eduardo Anguita’s “Venus en el pudridero”). This exhibition by Magdalena Benavente is made up of 18 collages featuring mixed media and a piece of video-art. Collage is the discipline that the artist usually uses to represent herself. Benavante creates interest by means of colour, generating small words in each piece. The freedom and flexibility of the medium randomly produce works with symbolic shapes and a high degree of eroticism. The discourse involves a link with the object as a fetish in relation to the sexual act, giving rise to works with an important poetical and magical content.
Magdalena Benavente was born in Santiago de Chile in 1965. Throughout her career, she has been interested in studying philosophy, tarot and the interpretation of dreams, which provides a direct link to the surrealist tendency. She is a member of the Women in the Visual Arts association and of her hometown’s Derrame Surrealist Group, which publishes the journal of the same name and held the exhibition Derrame Cono Sur o El Viaje de los Argonautas in the Granell Foundation in 2005 –it featured not only Chilean artists but also invited ones from Argentina and Brazil. The work of one of its outstanding members, Roberto Matta, who is also Chile’s most representative surrealist artist, forms part of Eugenio Granell’s surrealist collection.
In 2009 and 2010, she participated prominently in the "El Umbral Secreto" International Surrealism Exhibition that toured several cities in her home country. She currently lives in Chile’s Algarrobo Spa, where she is immersed in writing a new book of poems.
