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Opening – 23 April 2015, 8pm
24th April to 20th June 2015
Proyecto AMIL
Centro Comercial Camino Real
Lima
Sergio Zevallos – The Obscene Death, presents two series of drawings by Zevallos, made during the formation of Grupo Chaclacayo (1982-1995), one of the most daring collective experiments that emerged in Peru in the 1980s.
Grupo Chaclacayo — the German Helmut Psotta (Bottrop, 1937 Wesel, † 2012), and the Peruvians Raúl Avellaneda (Lima, 1960) and Sergio Zevallos (Lima, 1962)— has been an elusive presence and tales of the group have circulated as myths, both due to the scarcity of literature on their work, and the self-imposed exile of its members, who left Peru to live in Germany in 1989. Since then, knowledge of the group moved through rumors associated with the controversies sparked by their work, and certain contemporary positions and commentaries in the press that sought to dismiss and reject the way that the group addressed violence by a disturbing abjection in a male-dominated, misogynistic and homophobic society.
The two series of drawings exhibited here are based on various graphic material sourced from the city of Lima during the 1980s: prayer cards, press photos, pornographic magazines, cartoons and comics. Roses (1982) and Cause your flesh is the new born sky (1983) are representations of fantasies of pleasure and pain, colliding obscenity and brutality, religious myths and military cults, androgynous figures and scenes of bleeding. Both series show endless, entwined bodies, transforming religious ecstasy and sexual dissidence in critical traces to re-read social violence and colonial history, indirectly reflecting the first images of terror associated with the beginning of the internal armed conflict between the Maoist organization Shining Path and the Peruvian state. These drawings are one of the most startling testimonies of that decade.
Sergio Zevallos – The Obscene Death marks a return of these works to Lima after more than 30 years, since being originally exhibited at the Lima Art Museum in 1984, and then remaining in Berlin from 1989 until today. The book that accompanies this exhibition includes the addition of the series Altars (1985), and Blood and Ashes. Variations around the flag (1987), with the intent of providing a comprehensive overview of the complex and intense graphic works by Zevallos during 1980s, that remain relatively unknown to this day.
Curated by Miguel A. López