Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (1979)
© Graciela Iturbide, avec l'aimable autorisation de Toluca Editions et de l'artiste
As part of the Brussels Photo Festival, Mexican artist Graciela Iturbide is exhibiting some of her work in the immaculate setting of the A Stichting Foundation until April 2nd.
As soon as they enter, visitors are greeted by a reproduction of Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas), perhaps the Mexican artist's most emblematic work. On the borderline of reality, Graciela Iturbide has fun highlighting the extraordinary in the everyday. This rebranded Medusa brings together several of Iturbide's signature motifs: traditional black and white, her relationship with Mexican indigenous communities, and the links between people, nature and spirituality.
As a pioneer of documentary photography, the human being, and especially women, occupies a central place in the artist's work. She does not hesitate to live with her subjects for several months to extract the intimate, the invisible. This is the case, for example, with her series on the Juchitan community (in the state of Oaxaca) or the Seri community, in the Sonora desert, from which the photo of the Mujer Angel is taken. Here, Iturbide captures the detail that hits the bull's eye with this mysterious woman confronting a pebbled plain with an enormous radio-cassette.
Mujer-ángel (1979) © Graciela Iturbide, avec l'aimable autorisation de Toluca Editions et de l'artiste
However, the exhibition also focuses on another facet of her work, which could be described as "the human without the human". The photographer has made several trips to the United States and India where, unlike her Mexican work, the bodies disappear from her lens. Nevertheless, they are not invisible as these series of photographs focus on the traces left by the people in the landscape.
In the same way, when she took a series of photographs of the botanical garden in Oaxaca in the 1990s, the artist personified nature. In a sort of hospital for plants, she photographs huge, bandaged cacti, like botanical skyscrapers in convalescence.
© Graciela Iturbide, avec l'aimable autorisation de Toluca Editions et de l'artiste
Graciela Iturbide's photographs blend in perfectly with the pure white box offered by A Stichting Foundation. This venue, dedicated to photography, is resolutely turning towards Latin America after having hosted the masterful exhibition L'Amérique latine éraflée (Latin America Scratched) in 2021. At the helm is curator Alexis Fabry, who also was in charge of the retrospective of the photographer at the Fondation Cartier (Paris) last year.
The work of this true ambassador of Latin American photography can be discovered until 2 April.
Practical information:
Fondation A Stichting
Av. Van Volxem 304,
1190 Forest
Open from Wednesday to Sunday, from 1 to 6 pm.
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