LEILA TSCHOPP

Leila Tschopp’s work is a spatial, choreographic, and pictorial composition all in one. It explores the possible relationships between images, objects, and architecture at the intersection between painting and installation.

Since 2006, her work has interrogated the spatiality of painting by emphasizing the physical experience of viewers as they explore the installation or as they identify with the body of the performer. Her pictorial interventions take the shape of paintings on walls, paintings on canvas, mobile structures, and an array of objects and materials that, on occasion, entail the participation of dancers. They suggest signs of different image systems (art history, urban architecture, stage sets) to investigate each one’s spatial repercussions as well as the limits of real and represented space and the critical power part and parcel of installing images. Her recent works expand how her art is projected into the space: first, by means of objects laid out in the space and an experience of the work tightly bound to a performatic body; second, in a formal and conceptual approach firmly rooted in the terrain of installation as genre that encompasses and supervenes painting and as place created for the intent purpose of physical occupation, that is, for a concrete presence in a place beyond reach.

The paintings and objects that compose the space in her installations are precise in their ambiguity; they embody a combination of exactitude and indeterminacy. While abstract, they reference forms familiar to us (concise landscapes, the interiors of a body or a space). The objects are artifacts, tools, furniture, ceremonial items that find a dubious place for themselves somewhere between functionality and formalism. Forms closed and daunting in appearance that hold a mystery, a dilemma that is never fully worked out. Leila Tschopp is interested in ambiguity and vagueness as regulated and productive principle that, like silence, can be a complex mode of communication and perception, a specific way of experiencing the relationship with space and with others. She understands fiction not as a practice to tell stories but rather as a platform to read the real, to propose new coordinates of the visible and the sayable, and to alter the ways each of us can be affected by experiences.

Tschopp was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1978. In 2002, she graduated from the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredon, Buenos Aires, Argentina. She attended workshop by artist Tulio de Sagastizábal (2003-2005). 

She participated in the following residency programs: Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido, México (2024); Art Omi, New York, USA (2015), Residency Program for Latin America and Haiti Creators of FONCA-AECID, Mexico (2014) and Skowhegan, Maine, USA (2013), with the support of the Cisneros Collection; 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica, USA, with the support of Unesco- Aschberg Bursaries (2011) and ACC Galerie, Weimar, Germany (2010).

She is a recipient of The Pollock- Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, USA (2012); Metropolitan Fund for the Arts Grant (2012) and the National Fund for the Arts Grant, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2008) and the Colección Oxenford Grant (2020). 

Her work has been the subject of many solo shows, such as: Pintura inhumana, ArtHaus, Buenos Aires (2024); Paramnesia, la doctrina de los ciclos, La casa de fuego. La casa en llamas, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires (2023); La casa de fuego / La casa en llamas, Hache galería, Buenos Aires (2021); Hades en demora, BienalSur, Teatro San Martín, Buenos Aires (2019); Hades en hastío, Pasaje 17, Buenos Aires (2019); El camino del héroe, Galería Ethra, Ciudad de México (2019); AMA, Hache galería, Buenos Aires (2017); El camino del héroe, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires (2016); Vanguardia/Caballo de Troya/América, with Magdalena Jitrik, MACBA, Buenos Aires (2016), among many more.

Recent group exhibitions include: Imagina. Fantasías, sueños y utopías, BienalSur, SAMOCA-Saudi Arabian Museum of Contemporary Art, Jax District, Riyadh, Arabia Saudita (2023); XVI Premio Nacional de Pintura, Banco Central, Buenos Aires (2023); PintorAs, Usina del Arte, Buenos Aires (2019); The Art of Simulation, ACC Gallery, Weimar (2018); El Teatro de la Pintura, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2014); Geometría al límite, MACBA, Buenos Aires (2013); About Change, World Bank, Washington (2011), among others. 

Tschopp has been awarded the Third Prize in Painting at the Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales in 2021 and the Second Prize in 2014; the Premio Estímulo Adquisición at the Salón Nacional de Pintura UADE (2012) and the Second Prize at the Salón Nacional de Pintura del Banco Central in 2011.

Her work is included in the following publications: Leila Tschopp, Pasaje 17, Buenos Aires (2019); 100 Painters of Tomorrow, Thames & Hudson, Londres (2014) y Poéticas contemporáneas, Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires (2011).

Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museo Castagnino+MACRO, Rosario; MACBA – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires; Goethe Institut de Lisboa, Portugal; World Bank, Washington and Banco Central de la República Argentina, among many private collections.