Artist:
Curatorship:
Valeria González
Fundación Larivière presents the first anthological exhibition of Marcos López
By Marina Oybin
The Larivière Foundation inaugurates Marcos López. Photographies 1975–2025, the first major anthological exhibition dedicated to the renowned Argentine photographer. Curated by Valeria González, the show brings together over 200 works spanning five decades of creation—from his early years in Santa Fe to a selection of more than fifty images from the last five years, never before exhibited.
The exhibition, which includes fifty photographs from the Foundation’s own collection, offers a comprehensive journey through López’s oeuvre. It encompasses his travels around the world, striking portraits, pop-inspired staged scenes, intervened photographs, and pieces that have left a lasting mark on the collective imagination. Altogether, this body of work reveals the diversity and strength of his vision of Latin American identity.
In the exhibition text, González writes: “It is the perfect moment to revisit the artist who marked one of the origins of contemporary Argentine photography in 1993, when he began his series Pop Latino. At that time, there was no Google or Photoshop: proudly embracing marginality, Marcos López appropriated a First World, advertising-style aesthetic—only to mispronounce it, to build cardboard-painted scenes through whose cracks slipped all the irreverence and candor of a peripheral aesthetic. His documentary allegories rekindled, at a key historical moment, the political identity of Latin American photography.”
Belonging to a generation of photographers who witnessed the turning point between analog and digital photography, López persistently explored the aesthetics of precariousness as a sign of the times. A master of irony and subversion, through his staged scenes López questioned the very concept of documentary photography.
His work, internationally acclaimed, is part of prestigious collections such as the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Fondation Cartier (Paris), Tate Modern (London), the Guggenheim Museum and El Museo del Barrio (New York), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and MALBA (Buenos Aires), among many others.
This exhibition, which for the first time occupies both galleries of the Foundation, allows visitors to clearly see how López has built a visual poetics that is at once deeply personal and a mirror of contemporary Latin American identity.
Marcos López
Marcos López (Santa Fe, 1958) stands among the most influential photographers and visual artists in Latin America. His distinctive “Latin Pop” aesthetic reimagines the popular and the iconic, forging a visual language steeped in the complexity and vitality of Latin American identity. He began working in photography in 1975 and was awarded a fellowship from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes in 1982. He relocated to Buenos Aires, where he became involved with collectives such as the Núcleo de Autores Fotográficos. In 1987, he travelled to Cuba to study film-making under the guidance of Gabriel García Márquez, an experience that crystallized his visual sensibility. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, López produced some of his most emblematic works, including Asado en Mendiolaza, El cumpleaños de la directora, and Suite bolivariana. From 2008 onwards, his practice expanded to encompass painting, installations, and film. His documentary Ramón Ayala received the BAFICI Audience Award in 2013. López’s work has been exhibited in museums and biennials across more than twenty countries and forms part of major international collections, among them Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Tate Modern (London), Musée d’Art Moderne, Musée du Quai Branly and Fondation Cartier (Paris), Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao), and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires). López is the author of Marcos López, Pop latino plus, Debut y despedida, Exceso, Intervenido, and Querido diario. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Valeria González
Valeria González holds a degree in Art History from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), with a specialization in contemporary art and photography. A distinguished researcher and educator, she teaches at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels at UBA, UNTREF, and UNSAM. As an independent curator, González has organized over forty exhibitions. From 2016 to 2017, she served as Director of the Casa Nacional del Bicentenario, where she conceived and implemented the CNB Contemporánea program. Between 2018 and 2019, she was Secretary of Research at the Instituto de Artes of UNSAM, where she designed the curriculum for the recently-established Bachelor’s Degree in Contemporary Artistic Practices. She has served on more than forty juries for art prizes and academic evaluations, and contributes regularly to both scholarly and cultural publications. Her output includes El pez, la bicicleta y la máquina de escribir (Duplus, Ediciones Proa, 2005); Como el amor: polarizaciones y aperturas del campo artístico en la Argentina 1989–2009 (Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas/CCEBA, 2009); En busca del sentido perdido: 10 proyectos de arte argentino 1998–2008 (Editorial Papers, 2010); and Fotografía en la Argentina 1840–2010 (Ediciones Arte x Arte, 2011). From 2019 to 2023, González held the position of Secretary of Cultural Heritage at Argentina’s Ministry of Culture.