Mercedes Azpilicueta
Mercedes Azpilicueta is a visual and performance artist from Buenos Aires living and working in Amsterdam. Her artistic practice brings together various characters from the past and the present, who manifest as voices, shapes, texts, traces, and memories into her multi-layered works. Calling herself a “dishonest researcher,” Azpilicueta navigates through multiple references and fields of knowledge, from art history to popular music, literature to street culture, falling in love with dissident figures and trajectories — feminist, queer, migrant, exiled individuals — who haunt her scripts, performances and videos. However, her work never indulges into cold reverence or archival fascination. By engaging the body with all its flaws and potentials — her own body, that of her muses and collaborators, that of the spectators, but also fantasised ones — Azpilicueta embraces its fragility as well as its capacity for resistance and care.
She was an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam in 2015-16, and received the Pernod Ricard Fellowship in 2017. Solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Göttingen (2023); Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf (2022); Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz (2022); Gasworks, London (2021); CAC Brétigny, Brétigny-sur-Orge (2021); Museion, Bolzano/Bozen (2020); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2019); CentroCentro, Madrid (2019); Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2018); and Móvil, Buenos Aires (2015). Her work has been featured at Seoul Museum of Art (2023); Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (2023); the Hannah Ryggen Triennale at Kunsthall Trondheim (2022); MAXXI Museum, Rome (2021); Busan Biennale (2020); Villa Vassilieff, Paris; REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles; MACBA, Barcelona (all 2018); CA2M, Móstoles (2017); and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2014). Azpilicueta was nominated for the Prix de Rome 2021.