Galería Elba Benítez is pleased to announce Group Show / Muestra colectiva, Alejandro Cesarco’s second exhibition at the gallery.
The exhibition brings together twenty-seven works made between the sixteenth century and the present, which, from a wide range of contexts and languages, explore memory as a practice of fiction, repetition, and transformation. Rather than presenting a chronological trajectory, the works propose a constellation of affinities around the persistence of the image, portraiture, the fragility of language, and the ways in which the past continues to act upon the present.
Alejandro Cesarco is an Uruguayan artist living in Madrid. He has exhibited in museums and galleries throughout Latin America, the United States, and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museo Rufino Tamayo (Mexico City), Tate Modern (London), The Renaissance Society (Chicago), Frac Île-de- France/Le Plateau (Paris), MALBA (Buenos Aires), mumok (Vienna), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Artium Museoa (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and Kunsthalle Basel (Basel). He represented Uruguay at the 54th Venice Biennale and participated in the São Paulo Biennial on two occasions. He is Professor at Malmö Art Academy (Sweden) and Director of A.rt R.esources T.ransfer, a nonprofit organization based in New York. Since February, he runs Lawrence, a small art bookstore in Madrid. The exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Sweet Revenge, which he co-curated with Nancy Spector, is on view at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía through October 12.
Group Show / Muestra colectiva, 2026
inkjet print, 143 × 197 cm
Ed. 5 + 2AP
There is a long lineage of works that present seemingly empty galleries. Michael Asher, for example, often intervened in the architecture of otherwise empty galleries to reveal the institutional infrastructure underlying the exhibition. At a different scale, Group Show / Muestra colectiva, foregrounds the discursive conventions through which the institution frames, mediates, and presents art. Twenty-seven extended museum labels describe works spanning from the sixteenth century to the present, transforming what is ordinarily a secondary, explanatory element of an exhibition into its primary material. Through this inversion, absent artworks are produced through language, memory, and imagination, while the conventions that organize their presentation—authorship, chronology, medium, and interpretation—come to the foreground.
Learning the Language (Present Continuous III), 2025
Video, colour, sound, continuous loop (7:56 min cycle)
Ed. 5 + 2AP
This work is part of a series of video portraits in which I borrow the vocabulary of the person portrayed to address some of my own recurrent concerns (memory, repetition, regrets, etc.). In this case who is portrayed is David Lamelas, who is asked to listen back to an excerpt of the soundtrack of his film Reading Film From Knots by R.D. Laing from 1970.
Fear, Diagnostic, Ambition, 2024
inkjet prints, 20 × 14.5 cm
Ed. 5 + 2AP
Listing is an accessible, functional, and productive discursive technique which, among other things, facilitates mediation of the everyday. Lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of monitoring, of control, of being able to bring confusion to a halt. Lists soothe because they delimit, reduce, or condense—knowledge, culture, memory, information, chores, affects, meaning—things that are infinite, that never cease to overflow, that are always growing and escaping in flighty directions. In this case, the three lists collectively begin to define a character. One is an enumeration of fears. In another certain personality traits are clinically described. The third list is made up of the artists represented by Matthew Marks gallery.
