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  • Claudia Del Río (Rosario, 1957)


    “Art, that desperate craft”.

    Before graduating in Visual Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Caludia took several courses on theater and painting. Her early interest in the idea of communal work and creating networks of sociability first manifested itself though performances and mail art, during the late 1980s. Since the nineties, she produced a vast body of work, which ranges from painting and drawing, to collage, objects, embroidery, and photomontage. This appropriation of traditional techniques allows her to generate a fruitful bond between artistic creation, popular crafts and plastic language. It often addresses the effects of messages from the media, consumerism and even the school system, that ultimately construct and reinforce collective imaginaries regarding local, national and gender identities.


    From 2000 onward, she was able to expand her work to group projects that involve other artists, institutions, and the general public. In 2002, she co-founded the Club del Dibujo [Drawing Club], an ongoing venue where artists and non-artist come together to create freely. Since 2006, she created the Pieza Pizarrón [Blackboard Piece] project, a traveling device for drawing, theater, and education. The same year, she and fellow artist Carlos Herrera formed the duet Trulalala to recuperate the formal, material, and social aspects of traditional craft production, such as clay and pottery workshops, cut glass, bronze casting by creating pieces in collaboration with local manufacturers. This interest has an autobiographical meaning, as her own father was a chemical engineer who work in a pottery factory and often bought home clay for his two daughters. Her mother knitted, sew, and always worked with her hands. From her, Claudia inherited her love for textiles.