Acknowledgements
By Victoria Noorthoorn
It is with enormous pride that the Museo Moderno celebrates the legacy of Elda Cerrato in her first anthological exhibition. Over the course of her long career Elda became a teacher and mentor to many of the artists and theoreticians who today hold key roles on the Argentine art scene. To me personally, it is a huge joy to be able to honour a great artist who taught me when I was at university and celebrate her immense and rich history. True to her characteristic versatility, Elda adapted to the complex situation in 2020 and managed, together with the museum’s team, to put together an ambitious exhibition that looks back over fifty years of her artistic output in Buenos Aires, Tucumán and Caracas. It’s wonderful to see her standing next to her oeuvre, which combines a powerful personal gaze with a sensibility attuned to the political and social context across the wide range of territories and aesthetics she explored over the years. Right from the start, Cerrato engaged in profound study of different and challenging issues. Her intense curiosity about the mystery of living creatures led to a passion for biology and the potential of the scientific method. She was also influenced by her research into geometry and pictorial scales as well as the ‘Fourth Way School’ of George Gurdjieff, a hundred-year-old metaphysical and cosmological doctrine, and the political debates of the Argentine and Venezuelan intellectual avant gardes during decades when the continent was on a knife-edge. Art, spirituality, scientific knowledge and politics come together and establish an equitable dialogue in her work, which combines the supposedly antagonistic disciplines with great power and a determination that allowed her to transcend aesthetic boundaries. This ability to interrogate all manner of historic, scientific, political and philosophical issues through the illuminating medium of art makes her incredibly relevant today.
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