Argentine · b. 1965, lives Buenos Aires · Painting

Tomás Iriarte

Tomás Iriarte (born 1965, Buenos Aires) is a painter whose grisaille canvases attend to the collective body and to the spaces it occupies, abandons or is removed from. Working exclusively in black, white and grey, and from photographic source material, he depicts processions, queues, waiting rooms, courtyards and stadiums populated by many small anonymous figures, as well as the same civic architecture stripped of any presence at all. Trained in Buenos Aires during the closing years of the dictatorship, Iriarte came of age amid the slow public reckoning with disappearance, and his work carries that history as tone rather than illustration. The paint is held matte and even, the light overcast; nothing is dramatised. A figure at this distance is a mark among marks, legible as a person yet already on the edge of being lost to the mass or to the empty frame. Across three decades his subject has remained the political weight of public space, examined with documentary sobriety and considerable restraint. Iriarte has exhibited widely across Latin America and Europe, including at MALBA, the Museo Reina Sofía and the Bienal de São Paulo. He is represented by Brunner & Sand, Zürich, and lives and works in Buenos Aires.

I paint from photographs because the camera has already decided who is anonymous. A crowd is held together by the same light that, once the people leave, holds the empty plaza. I am interested in the moment a figure stops being someone and becomes part of a number. What a square remembers, it keeps very quietly.

Selected exhibitions

1996Plaza vacía · Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires · solo
1999La multitud · Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires · solo
2002Public Bodies · Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo · group
2004Ausencias · MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires · solo
200627ª Bienal de São Paulo · Fundação Bienal, São Paulo · group
2009The Emptied Square · Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel · group
2011Cola de espera · Brunner & Sand, Zürich · solo
2013Grisalla · Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires · solo
2015Memoria del espacio público · Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid · group
2018Recuento · MACBA – Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona · group
2020Patios · Brunner & Sand, St. Moritz · solo
2022The Quiet Multitude · Brunner & Sand, Zürich · solo
2024Civic Grey · Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo · group
2026Procesión · Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) · solo

Selected collections

MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo
Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel
MACBA – Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona
Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York
Fundación Costantini, Buenos Aires

Education

1984Diploma, Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón, Buenos Aires
1989Licenciatura en Artes Visuales, Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires
1992Postgraduate studies in painting, Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Ernesto de la Cárcova, Buenos Aires

Awards

1998Premio Nacional de Pintura, Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales
2010Konex Award, Visual Arts, Fundación Konex
2019Premio Federico Klemm a las Artes Visuales, Fundación Klemm

Works

15 works · enquiries welcome