Exhibitions
Fernanda Laguna and the art of transforming fragility into resilience
Since the early 1990s, Fernanda Laguna has built one of the most unique and challenging bodies of work in contemporary Latin American art. Her production, encompassing painting, drawing, collage, embroidery, writing, and installation, deliberately rejects the traditional solemnity of the art world, situating itself in a territory where the intimate and the affective acquire political force. Far from seeking formal perfection, Laguna works with simple materials, spontaneous gestures, and an aesthetic akin to the domestic, the childlike, and the artisanal. In her pieces, love, vulnerability, friendship, and desire appear as possible forms of resistance against structures historically dominated by patriarchal values and exclusionary cultural hierarchies.
The exhibition "My Heart Is a Magnet, 1992–2025 ," presented at the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA) and organized in collaboration with the Reina Sofía National Art Centre Museum, offers the most comprehensive retrospective of her career to date, running until May 25. Through more than 200 works and personal archives, the exhibition reveals how the artist transformed collaboration, sensitivity, and collective creation into fundamental tools of cultural production. Divided into seven thematic sections, the retrospective not only examines her aesthetic evolution but also the network of publishers, independent spaces, and affective connections that accompanied her artistic practice in Buenos Aires.
The retrospective is organized into seven sections that explore both Fernanda Laguna's individual work and collective projects between 1992 and 2025. For the first time, the exhibition offers a comprehensive view of a free, experimental, and profoundly provocative body of work, capable of expressing the urgent need to question the patriarchal structures that have dominated artistic discourse in recent decades. Through multiple formats and registers, the exhibition reveals a creative practice that transformed the affective and the marginal into a critical and transformative tool.
Laguna's work celebrates fragility, wonder, beauty, and also pain as essential experiences of everyday life. Her production dismantles the solemn distance of contemporary art, bringing it closer to intimacy, to relationships, and to the small rituals of living. In this journey, the exhibition illuminates key moments in a career deeply intertwined with feminism and reveals how many of the most active and combative forms of contemporary feminist activism emerged in the 1990s from spaces of friendship, collaboration, imagination, and collective creation.
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