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Mariela Scafati
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.