Organized by the Museo de Arte de Lima – MALI, this exhibition brings together for the first time a large part of the artist’s most ambitious series of drawings. Included are 19 works-consisting of more than a thousand pieces-made between 1997 and 2011, from public and private collections in Germany, Spain, the United States, Peru and Switzerland. Also included is the work Iraqi Art Today 1972-2008 from Malba’s collection, purchased in 2008 at the Pinta fair in New York, thanks to the Matching Funds program sponsored by the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank).
Curated by Natalia Majluf, director of MALI, and Tatiana Cuevas, curator of contemporary art at MALI until 2011, the exhibition allows the local public to approach the artist’s complex work system. Since the late 1990s, Fernando Bryce has produced an extensive body of work based on research in bibliographic and documentary archives to build new forms of representation of historical memory.
His series and subseries operate as discrete chapters in the larger framework of a broad but always incomplete general history. Bryce focuses on the grand narratives, the historical events and decisive processes of the century: the conquests of European imperialism, wars, revolutions, and the ideological debates of the Cold War. In short, the development of the international ideologies of communism and capitalism in his definition of the political contests of the 20th century.
His method – which he called early on „mimetic analysis“ – is based on the copying of official documents, press images, political propaganda or advertisements, articulating series of drawings that review power relations and their mediatization in the history of the 20th century. „Through re-presentation (in the most literal sense of showing again), by copying or simply staging documents and objects, Bryce generates instances of parody and irony as weapons to highlight the prejudices underlying the commonly accepted official discourses,“ explains curator Natalia Majluf.
On the occasion of the exhibition, Fernando Bryce will donate The World Over 1929 (2010) to Malba’s collection. With the addition of this piece, the museum’s Latin American art holdings, which have more than doubled since its foundation, continue to grow.
Fernando Bryce. Drawing Modern History began its itinerancy at the MALI, where it was presented between October 28 and February 5, 2012. It then continued its tour to the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, from March 3 to June 3, where it was very well received. The itinerancy culminates at Malba, where it will be presented until August 20, 2012.
