Biography
Leila Tschopp was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1978.
She graduated in 2002 as a Painting Professor in the National University of Arts (IUNA) in Buenos Aires.
She is a recipient of The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. In 2013 she was a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, USA. She has also participated at the 18th Streets Arts Center Residency Program in Santa Monica, California, USA in 2011 and at ACC Galerie Residency Program in Weimar, Germany in 2010.
She has had several Solo Exhibitions: El Salto, Transversal Gallery, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2012); Modelos Ideales, 713 Gallery, Buenos Aires (2011); Casa Tomada,
La Maison de L’Argentine, Paris (2011); Modelos Ideales, KIOSKO Gallery, Bolivia (2010) among others. She has also participated in numerous Group Exhibitions: Geometria Argentina Contemporánea, Buenos Aires Museum of Contemporary Art (2013); About Change, World Bank, Washington (2011); Beyond Desire, ACC Galerie, Weimar, Germany (2011); Argentina Today, Banco do Brasil Cultural Center, Sao Paulo (2009), among others.
Her work is included in the Collection of the Buenos Aires Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), Argentina; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rosario, Argentina; the Goethe Institut, Lisbon, Portugal; the World Bank, Washington, USA; the Central Bank of Argentina.
Vision of art
1. Choose a work that represents you, describe it in relation to its format and materiality, its relation with time and space, its style and theme; detail its production process.
I choose a painting that I'm working on right now. No title (they rarely do), measures 200 x 150 cm and it is acrylic on canvas. What interests me when working is the space construction in painting, as an imaginary model, a fiction. Overlay, to put together disparate places generating another reality, close to a dream one (though I do not feel close to the style resolution that surrealism has given to the subject) for its confusion, ambiguity and perplexity that it awakens. It is here, at this uncertain point where I leave all the photographic referents from where I had started, where the monsters, animals, figures without a name and pure forms appear. I try to follow the language, feel the resonance of memories, and let myself be delusional and fragmentary. I am obsessed with everything, with each area to paint, with each idea I think, with each color I choose and with the relationship of everything with everything. That's why I like this painting, because it builds a landscape that is not, because it has some colors that I think I've been using before but not really, because it has a dark green form that is a branch but also a bat, which is ahead but it is at the forefront of any horizon, it is much more matter, less rigid and tedious, it reveals certain strokes and some colors that are behind and that have left their mark in front too. The space is less labyrinthine than in other works, its formal composition is less complex, I do not have many ideas about what I want to accomplish with it, and what I love the most, I do not care.
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
I would suggest being prepared to stop, asking without finding a definitive answer.
3. In reference to your work and your position in the national and international art fields, what tradition do you recognize yourself in? Who are your contemporary referents? What artists of previous generations are of interest to you?
I should say, perhaps, that my work and my working process are included in what, we broadly define as painting. From the artists I've admired from the beginning, that accompanied me, those I have tried to copy in various ways and means, I quote, in no order: Balthus, Masaccio, De Chirico, Magritte, Battle Planas, Hooper, Piero della Francesca, Leonora Carrington, Virginia Woolf, Flaubert. Of those contemporaries who interest me and I admire, some closer in time and space, very different in their way of producing (compared to mine), some that I also attempt to copy, I quote, Luc Tuymans, Neo Rauch, Franz Ackerman, Jeff Wall, Marlene Dumas, Paula Rego, some paintings by Thomas Scheibitz, Max Gomez Canle, Alejandra Seeber, Victor Florido, Luis Lindner, Pablo Siquier, Tulio de Sagastizábal, Patricio Larrambebere, Guillermo Kuitca. And Julian Barnes, Godard & Lynch.
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
I venture: Lindner in Klemm Foundation in 1998, Fabián Burgos in Dabbah Torrejón, Sebastian Gordin in Ruth Benzacar, Fermín Eguía at the Recoleta, Images of the Unconscious at Proa, Kuitca at Malba, Victor Grippo at Malba.
5. What tendencies or groupings from common elements do you see in argentine art of the last ten or fifteen years?
I feel exceeded by the question. There are so many people, all kinds of, solitary, in groups, galleries, outside the galleries, with commercial success, without it, with different worries and concerns or with clear mind.
