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.

Her work has been recently shown at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (in the context of the 11th Berlin Biennial); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Storefront for Art and Architecture, NY; MALBA Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires; MACBA Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires; MAMBA Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires; Museo de Arte Moderno de Varsovia; Collegium, Arévalo, Spain; and the galleries Isla Flotante in Buenos Aires and Travesía Cuatro, in Madrid, among others. In 2022 she was part of Documenta Fifteen as a member of Serigrafistas Queer and of the exhibition Giro Gráfico curated by Red Conceptualismos del Sur, at the Reina Sofía Museum and MUAC-UNAM in Mexico City.

Among other collaborative projects related to screen printing, education, performance and radio, Scafati is co-founder of the Taller Popular de Serigrafía (TPS) with which she made the performance Ni verdaderas ni falsas; she was part of Belleza y Felicidad; she created together with Lola Granillo the Radio Electrónica Artesanal. In 2020, she joined a collective that is building the Huerta Agroecológica Transfeminista in Buenos Aires.

Scafati’s work is in the permanent collections of Neue NationalGalerie, Berlin; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Museo Tamayo, CDMX; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; MCA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Wolfsbourg Museum, Germany; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix; MALBA, Buenos Aires; MACBA, Buenos Aires; MAC – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bahía Blanca, Argentina.