MADRID.- Travesía Cuatro announces Nombrar el Mundo, Mariela Scafati’s first institutional solo exhibition in Spain, which opens at Contemporánea Condeduque this upcoming Thursday, April 23, at 7:00 p.m.
The starting point for this project is the question the artist poses to her closest circle: “What sustains you in the present and for the future?” Based on the affection exchanged in interpersonal relationships and conversations shared with friends, Mariela Scafati creates her new works, which are presented for the first time in this exhibition: on one hand, she presents eight canvas-bodies that form the backbone of this show. Created in 2026—and titled Dai, Devo, Estela, Guille, Lola, Magui, Manu, and Nico—they consist of several monochrome canvases tied together with ropes following the Japanese shibari technique and dressed in clothing, as if they were bodies.
On the other hand, spread out over a large rock constructed on the floor of the gallery, is the series Faldas banderas (2003–2026), created from her own polleras—skirts in Argentina—which are undressed and, when turned inside out, reveal the seams to condense into painted words the phrases and terms that move and permeate them. At the same time, the exhibition will feature an audio piece that brings back several episodes of Radio Eléctrica Artesanal, produced in collaboration with Lola Granillo and broadcast in Buenos Aires between 2010 and 2012, highlighting the political significance of the collective reflection.
Painter and screen printer, Mariela Scafati (1973) lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She uses her painting and serigrapher knowledge as a starting point for her works, where technique is always at the service of a strange formal vitalism. Scafati acts without transitions, whether she sews pieces of cloth to compose geometries or when she writes posters that expand the text messages on her phone during a period of militancy, or even when she transfers her intimate bondage practices to the materiality of the painting, the work ends up having a character of body and expression. Her works are always a pulse of her most personal interests: desire, the streets, otherness. Through this lack of mediation, she achieves the difficult challenge of connecting her formal experiences with her private and political militancies.
Among her most recent projects are Beijo, a duo exhibition by Mariela Scafati and Hélio Oiticica, at Pivô, São Paulo and the group exhibition Lo que la noche le cuenta al día at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Province, Mar de Plata, Argentina.
Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at MASP, São Paulo; MALBA, Buenos Aires; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires; PAC, Milan, Italy; the KW Institute for Contemporary Art (as part of the 11th Berlin Biennale); Collegium, Arévalo, Spain; Storefront for Art and Architecture, NY; and Isla Flotante Gallery, Buenos Aires, among others.
She also took part in Documenta Fifteen with the project Rancho Cuis, as a member of Serigrafistas Queer, a group that create slogans to print on t-shirts to use at LGBTQIA+ pride marches and transfeminist demonstrations. Since 2013, she has been part of Cromoactivismo (together with artists Daiana Rose, Marina De Caro, Vic Musotto and Guille Mongan), a group that uses color to intervene poetically in political events.
Among other collaborative projects related to screenprinting, education, performance and radio, Scafati is cofounder of Taller popular de Serigrafía (TPS); she was part of Belleza y Felicidad; in 2014 she made the performance Ni verdaderas ni falsas with TPS and Serigrafistas Queer t-shirts, that was also presented in 2022 in Reina Sofía Museum in the context of Giro gráfico exhibition; she created Radio Electrónica Artesanal together with Lola Granillo.
Scafati’s work is part of institutional collections such as the NationalGalerie, Berlin; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum, Madrid; MCA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MALBA, Buenos Aires; MACBA – Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires; MAC – Museum of Contemporary Art of Bahía Blanca, Argentina.
