Exhibitions
The Modern Museum presents 'Verciopelo Club', Daniel Basso's first major exhibition in Argentina
The Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires bids farewell to 2025 with an exceptional program that transforms each of its galleries into a territory of aesthetic exploration. The year's end finds the museum completely immersed in a series of temporary exhibitions with a strong visual and conceptual impact, among which the interventions of Elian Chali, the exhibition Modern and Metamodern , Art is Theater , and Daniel Basso: Velvet Club stand out, the latter running until March 2026.
In this context, the Museum of Modern Art presents the first solo exhibition in an Argentine museum by Daniel Basso (Mar del Plata, 1974), a key figure in understanding the intersections between contemporary art, design, and popular visual culture. The exhibition brings together a series of previously unseen works, produced specifically for this occasion, which encapsulate the recurring interests of the Mar del Plata-born artist and project them into a new spatial register.
Through sumptuous materials, enveloping surfaces, and references to nocturnal aesthetics, Terciopelo Club creates an atmosphere where the bittersweet memory of the Atlantic coast, the nostalgia for a promised modernity, and the ambiguous pulse of the night as a stage for desire and disenchantment coexist. Basso works with a sensitivity that rescues the everyday beauty of commercial design—signs, textiles, colors, and textures—to place it in tension with the collective emotions that permeate these languages.
The exhibition is thus part of a broader reflection on the ways in which art engages with urban experience, leisure, and affective memory, consolidating the Modern Museum as a space where the contemporary is not only exhibited, but lived as a sensory and cultural experience.
Curated by Franco Chimento, the exhibition proposes a universe constructed from objects of intense fascination, situated in an ambiguous territory between sculpture, architecture, and pure ornament. At this threshold, Daniel Basso unfolds his own unique language, shaping simulacra that are as artificial as they are habitable—spaces that invite exploration and experience, animated by a distinctly playful spirit.
Through shifts in scale, perceptual games, and elaborate contrasts of textures and colors, the artist transforms each environment into a device of appearances, where reality dissolves into a carefully constructed fiction. His installations function as stages in which nothing is entirely stable and in which the viewer is enveloped by a sensory experience that prioritizes visual deception and illusion.
Through a unique interpretation of the cultural atmosphere of the 1990s, Basso reclaims the aesthetics of nightclubs, the imagery of popular tourism, and a deliberate celebration of surfaces. These elements, far from functioning as mere nostalgic references, are taken to the limits of formal eccentricity, immersing the viewer in an evanescent landscape where collective memory, artifice, and desire merge in a continuous interplay of visual seduction.
