Biography
Luciana Lamothe (Buenos Aires, 1975) is a visual artist who works in sculpture, performance, activation, drawing, photography and video.
She is interested in exploring the transformative capacity of matter through the relationships between materials, bodies, and spaces.
Her work is rooted in the successive social crises that have shaped 21st-century Argentina. The starting point of her research is the 2001 Argentine crisis, an event that fractured the country’s social, economic, and material dynamics. In this context, the streets became arenas of collective transformation, where the tensions of the moment and the traces of resistance led to a reconfiguration of relationships with the city, spaces, and forms of social interaction.
A crisis can be understood as both a disruption and a simultaneous reconfiguration of a system. In this sense, she examines the dialectical relationship between construction and destruction as a fundamental tool for understanding this state—not merely as collapse but as a potential for transformation. This relationship reveals how processes of disintegration can open pathways to new forms and dynamics, challenging rigid structures and enabling new possibilities.
To explore this constant transformation, she uses the concepts of transmateriality and monomateriality as central strategies for investigating the potentialities of materials.
Transmateriality refers to the ability of materials to transform and acquire new properties through physical and conceptual processes. She argues that all materials, even those historically considered rigid, possess an inherent “softness” that depends on human perception, the tools used, and their interactions with other materials. This perspective suggests that materials are not static entities but dynamic agents capable of altering their characteristics and behaviors in response to their context.
On the other hand, monomateriality involves a deep immersion into the possibilities of a single material, exploring its origin, transformation, use, and disposal. This approach allows for an investigation into the inner life of matter, revealing its “energetic face”: the forces and tensions manifested in its structure and behavior.
In this way, she maintains that materials are not inert supports but structuring forces—sensitive agents in constant transformation. She creates spaces of indeterminacy where she explores the limits and tensions between opposing concepts such as rigid-flexible, soft-hard, use-function, industrial-natural, and human-nonhuman. These explorations propose a dynamic and sensitive vision of matter, capable of redefining the ways we inhabit the world.
In 2024, she was selected to represent Argentina at the 60th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia and was a recipient of the Scholarships and Commissions Program of The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. In 2023, she held the exhibition Cien caminos en un solo día at the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires.
In 2021, she participated in BIENALSUR in Argentina and Chile and received a special mention in Sculpture at the National Visual Arts Salon of Argentina. In 2019, she was invited to Meridians at Art Basel Miami and received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for artists in New York. In 2018, she was invited to the Public Art Program of Art Basel Cities in Buenos Aires.
She participated in the 11th Lyon Biennale, the 5th Berlin Biennale, the 3rd Montevideo Biennale, and an exhibition for the 7th edition of the International Biennial of Gothenburg. In 2011, she won the First Prize at the Lichter Art Award in Frankfurt and the First Prize from the Itaú Cultural Foundation in Buenos Aires.
Her work has been exhibited in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Amsterdam, Miami, Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata, Santiago de Compostela, Venice, and Rio de Janeiro. She has been an artist-in-residence at Art Dubai, MANÁ Wynwood, Air Antwerp, and Skowhegan Residency in Maine.
She graduated as a Fine Arts Professor specializing in Sculpture at ENBA Prilidiano Pueyrredón and participated in the Kuitca Grant program at Torcuato Di Tella University.
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Extended biography
By Ana Inciarte
Luciana Lamothe (Buenos Aires, 1975) trained as a sculptor at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón (1999) and in two spaces that proved decisive for her work: the studio of Aroldo Lewy (1995–99) and the clinic by Pablo Siquier (2003–04).
Lamothe explores the concept of tension in a variety of supports and media, including sculpture, performance, drawing, photography and video. She takes the potential of materials and tools to extremes, tensing such constituent binomials of modernity as use/function, form/function, construction/destruction, hardness/softness, feminine/masculine, human/non-human.
Lamothe’s early pieces already exhibited the core components of her poetics. In the series of Cartones [Cardboards] (2000), she worked the material in layers with stripped-down symmetrical curved patterns and left the surfaces untreated, pushing the relationship between ornament and raw material to its limit. In Gofrados [Embossings] (2001), she incorporated the urban space by treading on long rolls of paper to imprint paving stones and fencing scrolls on them.
Between 2003 and 2006, Lamothe left the studio to perform and record acts of urban vandalism. She used tools whose original function of building or repairing was subverted for destructive purposes, thus disrupting the use/function and construction/destruction binomials and radicalising the potential of tools and materials, as in the series Intervenciones vandálicas [Vandalistic Interventions] (2003–06) or the videos Autor material [Material Author] and 5 acciones [5 Actions], both from 2005, the year she was awarded a prize in the Galería Ruth Benzacar’s Currículum Cero competition in Buenos Aires. In Criminal (GRB, 2008), she introduced urban objects into the gallery using a criminal logic. She blended violence and potential action in Función [Function] (2011), a sharp-pointed scaffold exhibited after punching holes in the gallery walls. Along the same lines was the video Testa (2006), which linked the idea of destruction with the work of Italo-Argentinian brutalist architect Clorindo Testa.
As a recipient of a 2010–11 Kuitca Fellowship, Lamothe exhibited Plan (subsequently presented at the 11th Biennale de Lyon, 2011), a scaffolding structure suspended from a stripped, bare wall, thus contradicting its own forms and functions. As reticular form and modular tool, scaffolding and its components – metal tubes and couplers, wooden planks – formed the basic unit of Lamothe’s lexicon in articulating the concepts of architecture, body and material.
The body of the viewer plays an integral part in heightening the tension of the artist’s works. In the large-scale participatory work Contacto [Contact] (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 2013), the flexing of the wood and vibration of the metal in the scaffolding platform triggered vertigo. This search was taken to the extreme in the exhibition The Function of Form (Galleria Alberta Pane [GAP], Paris, 2014) and the works Prueba de tensión [Stress Test] (GRB, 2014; Museo Provincial de Arte Contemporáneo [Museo MAR], Mar del Plata, 2015; Centro Cultural Recoleta [CCR], Buenos Aires, 2023), Metasbilad (La Maison Rouge, Paris, 2015) and Metasbilad (Prisma KH, Buenos Aires, 2016) and Proceso de inicio [Starting Process] (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo [CGAC], Santiago de Compostela, 2017). The increase in scale entailed a return to the public space, as in Starting Zone (2018), a temporary open-air tower exhibited under the curatorship of Cecilia Alemani during Art Basel Cities Buenos Aires, or Repetición x Quiebre [Repetition due to Breakage] (2021), a tunnel of broken red timbers at the entrance to the Museo de Arte Decorativo de Buenos Aires, or Amorfa [Amorphous] (2023), a wooden belt propelled through the streets of downtown Buenos Aires by the performers inside it. The scale of Lamothe’s works may also call for collaborations with dance, sound or lighting specialists, as in Invocar el acto [Invoking the Act] (2022), or form a space of containment, as in Cien caminos en un solo día [A Hundred Roads in a Day] (2023), where she designed a suburban landscape for the exhibition of works from the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires collection.
Lamothe explores the concept of transformation by devising different ways to perceive tools and materials in interaction, integrating their points of view to escape from preconceptions of genre or species. To this effect, she bends wooden sheets in such sculptures as Prototipos [Prototypes] (CCR, 2015) or Layers (Steve Turner Gallery [STG], Los Angeles, 2016), or participatory works like Banco [Bench] (Premio Braque, Buenos Aires, 2015), and in Bidimensional bisagra [Two-Dimensional Hinge] (Centro Cultural Haroldo Conti, Buenos Aires, 2015) or the exhibition Fricciones [Frictions] (GRB, 2022). Likewise, metals may be softened by the radical use of cutting and welding tools acting through flexion and linear openings, as in the exhibition Mutation (GAP, Venice, 2018), or by making irregular openings reminiscent of plants, as in the exhibitions Ensayos de apertura [Opening Tests] (GRB, 2018) and I’m Burning Here (STG, 2019), or in Brutal Ambivalence, exhibited at Meridians: Art Basel, Miami Beach, in 2019, the year she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. This technique extends to railings or handles, small-scale architectural features for manual use, as in One Frame Life (GAP, Paris, 2022).
The hardness/softness dualism is also present in the dialogue between solid materials and bodily fluids, as in Meadas [Pissings] (2003), a record of the act of urinating on the pavement, Spit on the Cement Floor (GAP, Paris, 2012), a floor covered in cement powder spat on and hardened by viewers, or Escupir en el espejo [Spit on the Mirror] (2013), where saliva trickles over the artist’s reflection.
Lamothe has also explored the limits of the camera and drawing as tools, articulating visibility/opacity with excess/absence of light in series like Ícono no [Icon No No] (winner of the First Itaú Prize, 2011), Encd (2013) or Retrato borde [Edge Portrait] (2022), in which the city is a setting and the body a referent. In her drawings, the outlines of such everyday work elements as pipes, pliers or hands function as modular units in abstract compositions, integrating and condensing her poetic acts of search and insistence.
In addition to the above exhibitions and recognitions, Lamothe won First Prize at the Lichter Art Award, Frankfurt (2011), and has been shortlisted for the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation’s (CIFO) Grants and Commissions Programme, the 2023 Alberto J. Trabucco Sculpture Acquisition Award, the Federico Jorge Klemm Award (2021, 2022), the 8M Acquisition Award (2022), Argentina’s National Visual Arts Exhibition (Special Mention, Sculpture, 2021) and others. She has participated in the 3rd Montevideo Biennial (2016) and the 5th Berlin Biennial (2008). She has exhibited in numerous international spaces, including the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Museu Da Maré, Rio de Janeiro; the Museo del Barrio, New York; Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA), Buenos Aires. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Factatory in Lyon, the Atelier Ni in Marseille, the Mana Wynwood Convention Center in Miami, Art Dubai, the Antwerp Artists in Residence (AAIR) programme, and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine. Her works form part of major public and private collections, including: the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC), Santiago de Compostela; Fundación América, Buenos Aires; Fundación Itaú Cultural, Buenos Aires; the Museo Arte Contemporáneo de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (MAR), Buenos Aires; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario (Castagnino+MACRO), Santa Fe; the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH), Texas; the 21c Museum Hotels, Kentucky.