Gabriela Bettini

Gabriela Bettini - The earth keeps its memory I

Artist Biography: Gabriela Bettini (born in Madrid, 1977) is a Spanish visual artist of Argentine origin. Her current interests are framed in investigating the first cultural colonizations in relation to their inheritance in the present. From a specific review of the history of painting and the representation of landscape -with which she observes how this medium has been used to strengthen the ideas on which Western hegemonic thought has been built- she analyzes the combination of the current environmental crisis with an extractivist model that places women as a paradigm of the multiple violence of climate change. She has worked on post-memory, in a group of works that revisit the dominant narratives of the generation that lived through the Argentine dictatorship and that directly link the archive with her own biography. In addition, many of her projects have revolved around the domestic space, which on several occasions she has analyzed with the attitude of curiosity, strangeness or impossibility typical of someone who has inherited the process of exile from the place of the second generation. In her work, she has approached life experiences on the margins of History that evidence the emptiness resulting from the attempt to reconcile memories, memory policies and official narratives. Gabriela Bettini has approached intermediate places to underline the way in which certain experiences and their traces are inscribed in them and has been interested in elements that symbolize the journey between realities, whose interstitial character she has interpreted as a metaphor for the state of liminality, openness and ambiguity of those who pass through them. Gabriela Bettini has exhibited at the Centro Cultural Borges and the Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti (ex-ESMA), both in Buenos Aires; the Centro Cultural Tlatelolco in Mexico City; Casa de América Latina in Lisbon; TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes and Fondation Argentine in Paris. He has won the 2019 DKV Award; the 1st Obra Abierta Award - International Plastic Arts Award Caja de Extremadura (2017), the Visual Arts Creation Grants of the Community of Madrid (2017) and the MAEC-AECID Painting Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome (2015-16). Other recognitions include the Prize for Artistic Creation of the Community of Madrid, the Injuve Art Exhibition or the "la Caixa" Foundation and British Council Scholarship for Postgraduate Studies in the United Kingdom.