The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is pleased to announce Marcia Schvartz: Power in Looking Back. This exhibition presents a focused survey of the influential Argentine artist Marcia Schvartz’s portraits, across various media, from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Over the past five decades, Marcia Schvartz (b. 1955) has painted people, subcultures, and social dynamics through an anti-patriarchal lens. Ranging from tender character studies to grotesque caricatures, her work offers an unflinching look at daily life that exposes its harsher realities, from the fragility of the aging body to the experience of exile. 

Bringing together paintings, pastel works on paper, archival documents, and photographs, this survey explores how Schvartz has brought visibility to individuals often pushed to the margins of society and overlooked by history. Created in the shadow of Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976–83) and its return to democracy in the 1980s, the portraits on view center experiences of displacement and disenfranchisement, sensitively rendered through an expressionistic visual language. Responding to this context of political upheaval, Schvartz joined a lineage of artists who have embraced portraiture as a form of public testimony—guided by humanist principles—that foregrounds personal experience in the face of authoritarianism.

The exhibition unfolds across three sections, each focusing on a distinct moment in Schvartz’s artistic trajectory: her erotic portraits on burlap from the postdictatorship period, her pastel drawings made during her exile in Spain, and her vignettes of domestic workers and city life. Additional materials from the artist’s archive, preserved in the ISLAA Library and Archives, illuminate her active role in the creative communities of Barcelona and Buenos Aires. For Schvartz, portraiture is a means of bearing witness and confronting dominant viewpoints—a practice of identification and remembrance in which traces of shared experience and histories of loss are brought to light.

Marcia Schvartz: Power in Looking Back is curated by Olivia Casa, curator and senior manager of exhibition programs, with Clara Prat-Gay, curatorial assistant. Additional research support was provided by Agustín Díez Fischer, senior manager of research and archives. The exhibition is accompanied by an original booklet featuring an essay by María Laura Carrascal and designed by Luiza Dale.