Mariela Scafati
19 cm closer

Mariela Scafati is not utterly unknown in Berlin after letting 65 monochrome canvas bodies besiege an exhibition space at the KW within the 11. Berlin Biennale in 2020. Presented by PSM, the Argentinian artist’s first gallery exhibition in Europe includes an installation taking up the two exhibition rooms and new figurative objects. They are made of monochrome canvases, tied with each other by ropes and suspended with pulleys in space up to the ceiling.

Despite the sculptural and spatial formats of her works from the past years Mariela Scafati herself still speaks of painting and indeed, one always deals with actual canvases and paint. Furthermore, Scafati forgoes as much as possible the use of technical applications and tools such as screen printing, tapes or painter’s rollers. Instead, she creates her monochrome paintings with brushes only, painting the surface in several layers.

For Mariela Scafati painting serves as a medium of memory and of processing personal experiences, especially those made in social contexts. Indeed, her artistic practice has been essentially informed by the frequent political activities in the streets of Buenos Aires since the early 2000s that Mariela Scafati engaged in within activist collectives of the LGBTQI+ community.