Bienvenu Steinberg & C is pleased to present Neighbors, Ana Tiscornia's second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from April 8 to May 10, 2025, with an opening reception on Tuesday April 15, from 6 to 8pm.
In Neighbors, Tiscornia explores the tension between opposing forces: loss and rescue, surrender and resistance, outrage and acceptance, ugliness and beauty. The exhibition is an exercise in perseverance. In her attempt to navigate inhospitable times, Tiscornia recovers traces of vanished architectures. Over the course of her gentle excavations, she sometimes stumbles upon the resilience of nature: destruction is then countered by the presence of cacti. Emerging between architectural remnants, their precarious silhouettes embody endurance and survival. From a painting to another, cacti push through the wreckage, stubborn and alive.
For many years, Tiscornia’s work grapples with displacement, memory, uncertainty, and repetition. She employs architectural tools to map a cartography of desolation and oblivion, intertwining the language of construction with that of destruction and dislocation. Her latest paintings - on canvas, wood or dry wall panels- activate perceptions of physical fragility and ideological collapse.
In a realm where ruin and resilience coexist, the work suggests both poetic rescue and an unsettling friction between presentation and content. “My interest in memory has nothing to do with any kind of nostalgia, it relates to the fact that I believe in the importance of history. I tend to think that those who want to erase history are looking for a free path to repeat some parts of it, parts which can only be repeated if one has forgotten about them.” (Ana Tiscornia)
She works at the threshold of construction and collapse, where loss and resilience fold into one another. Her surfaces are not neutral; they bear the marks of time, rupture and repair. Her paintings do not represent destruction; they enact it. Architectural structures dissolve into painting, floor plans disarticulate space, empty rooms refuse to be empty. Absence becomes matter, a form in itself. The use of actual architectural components, such as door panels, fragment of fabric or decorative patterns, pushes the work beyond representation into a literal display of material and memory. The paintings do not merely depict destruction; they embody it, bearing visible traces of deterioration and patches, scratches, cuts and holes.
Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1951, Ana Tiscornia has lived and worked in New York since 1991. She represented Uruguay at the II and IX Havana Biennials and the III Lima Biennial, and was included in the Bienal del fin del mundo en Mar del Plata, Argentina. Her work has been exhibited at Art OMI (Ghent, NY), Parque de la Memoria (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Buenos Aires (MACBA), Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales (Uruguay), Museo Juan Manuel Blanes, Museo Gurvich, Museo Zorrilla de San Martin and Museo Figari all in Montevideo Uruguay, la Casa Encendida (Madrid, Spain), Columbia University (New York), and the Black Room at the Museo Tamayo (Mexico) among others. She has received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the Premio Konex Mercosur, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Tiscornia is an Emeritus Professor at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury.