Elda Cerrato, who was born in Italy and based in Argentina, also made her posthumous Venice Biennale debut in 2024, one year after her death. Yet her showcase was in an overstuffed section on the Italian diaspora, making it tough for her art to shine. We ought to be thankful, then, that Cerrato is now getting a proper exhibition at Galerie Lelong. This gallery has always paid attention to uncanonical Latin American artists, even before many of its blue-chip colleagues did. The Lelong show is not a complete retrospective, to be sure, though a savvy institution would be wise to get to work on that, stat. Still, even though this exhibition covers only an 11-year sliver of Cerrato’s career, it feels like a significant contribution to postwar art history.
The earliest works here date to the mid-1960s, when Cerrato began making bizarre abstractions featuring egg-shaped forms. Made under the sign of writings by the philosopher George Gurdjieff, these paintings belong to the aptly named “Strange Beings Series,” and they allude to communication across cosmic zones. One features the reddish outline of an antenna that beams its signal toward a black ovoid. That the antenna is attached to a breast-like appendage may hint at a feminist context she furthered in Floración de un ente (Flowering of a Being, 1970), in which a tree grows from the stomach of a nude woman, aligning the female body with nature.
Then, by the mid-’70s, as Argentina was plunged into violence by a military dictatorship, Cerrato went in an entirely different direction. In place of all the woo-woo mysticism of her ’60s paintings, there appears a concern about global inequities. Pasa lo mismo en el movimiento que en el mapa? (Does the same thing happen in movement as on a map?, 1976) depicts the outlines of the US and Africa becoming subsumed by roaring protesters; beneath these maps is an image of a shantytown adjoined to a bourgeois neighborhood. Cerrato envisions disparate spaces and peoples, wondering whether the gaps between them can ever fully be closed.
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