Josefina Auslender | Hyperallergic
July 28, 2022 | Carl Little
Josefina Auslender’s Portraits of Argentina’s Dirty War
In a statement for her current show at Sarah Bouchard Gallery, Argentine-born, Maine-based artist Josefina Auslender recounts how she came to paint her Los Cuerpos (the bodies) series. She had been working on another series, La Cuidad (the city), riffing on architectural elements of Buenos Aires, when, in her words, “suddenly these figures began to come out.”
The year was 1979 and Argentina’s so-called “Dirty War” was well underway. During the military junta’s rule, between 1976 and 1983, some 30,000 persons were “disappeared.” Opposition figures were abducted and often tortured and killed, their bodies sometime disposed of from planes over the ocean. In response, the “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” in Buenos Aires stood in protest, bearing signs with photos and names of their missing children.
