This exhibition seeks to recover a forgotten chapter in the history of Argentine modernism. The story of Argentine art in the 1960s is most often told through the lens of the Instituto Di Tella and the conceptual, experimental and avant-garde practices that transformed Buenos Aires into one of Latin America’s most dynamic cultural centres. Other artistic communities, networks, and sensibilities have faded from attention beyond this established narrative.
Dignora Pastorello belongs to this overlooked history.
Working alongside a loose circle of artists that included Luis Centurión, Ángel Roberto Fadul, Juan Ibarra, Andrés Fernández Taboas and María Vurro, Pastorello inhabited a parallel artistic universe, one removed from the intellectual provocations of conceptual art. Instead, these artists pursued a deeply personal and imaginative form of painting rooted in observation, memory, fantasy and what Centurión termed “Sinisterism”:an understanding of reality in which the ordinary and the mysterious coexist.
While much of Argentine art of the period looked towards technology, politics and the future, Pastorello turned her attention to the intimate world around her. Balconies, staircases, gardens, neighbours, birds and cats become the protagonists of paintings that hover between reality and dream. Familiar places are subtly transformed into stages for unexplained events, where enchantment quietly emerges from everyday life. Neither fully realist nor surrealist, Pastorello developed a singular pictorial language that resists easy categorisation. Her paintings reveal an alternative modernity, one in which domestic life, imagination and attentive observation become vehicles for mystery and wonder.
More than a historical rediscovery, this exhibition proposes a broader understanding of Argentine art in the twentieth century. Through Pastorello’s work, we encounter a parallel modernism: intimate rather than monumental, poetic rather than programmatic, shaped not by manifestos or movements but by the persistent transformation of everyday life into something strange, tender and extraordinary.
This exhibition is in collaboration with Daniel Malarkey.
Dignora Pastorello (b. 1914, Banfield - d. 2001, Buenos Aires, Argentina) graduated from the prestigious National School of the Fine Arts of Buenos Aires. Between 1953 and 1957 she perfected her skills in the workshops of painters Jorge Larco, Ramón Gómez Cornet, and Luis Centurión and, from the late 1950s, started exhibiting her work in group and solo exhibitions across Latin America. In 1967, she was invited to participate in the exhibition Primitivos actuales de América [Contemporary Primitives of America] in Madrid. Her works are part of important public collections, including the Fine Arts Museums in the Argentine cities of Avellaneda, Campana, Catamarca, Luján, and Posadas; the Genaro Pérez Municipal Museum of Fine Arts of Córdoba; the Modern Art Museum of Buenos Aires; the Museum of La Plata; The Museum of the Sea of Mar del Plata; and the Modern Art Museum of Mendoza among others.
