ISLAA Spotlights is a series of focused presentations that highlight pivotal works from the collection across our programmatic spaces. These displays create opportunities for close engagement with artists and ideas that remain underrepresented in dominant art historical narratives, offering a platform to explore individual practices in greater depth.

Spotlight presentations are open during select hours and by appointment. To inquire about a tour or visit, please contact us at info@islaa.org.

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The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is pleased to present Los Sobrevivientes (1963) by French Argentine artist Lea Lublin (1929–1999) as part of the Spotlight series.

In 1963, in the catalogue of Lublin’s solo exhibition at the Riobbo Gallery in Buenos Aires, Argentine critic Aldo Pellegrini wrote: “Lea Lublin presents us with a nightmarish world that reflects the secret panic in which modern man is submerged. A world threatened by disintegration and populated by monsters, a hidden world that the artist captures, becoming a spokesperson for man’s anguish.” This ominous universe—emerging at one of the most intense moments of the Cold War and the threat of mutually assured destruction—saturated the Beasts and Explosions series. Los Sobrevivientes was part of this series. 

After decades out of public view, the painting is now exhibited for the first time at ISLAA. With an imposing scale, the oil painting creates a striking relief through a composition structured around deep diagonals and fields of color including white, yellow, and red. The composition offers no rest for the eye, generating a dramatic effect that resembles the snapshot of an atomic explosion. Only a few contours can be made out—perhaps a human shadow, maybe a child—and beast-like figures, images similar to those the artist painted in other works from this same series. Does the series portray different representations of the same instant? Or are they various moments of an explosion unfolding over time?

Lublin’s artistic training took place between Buenos Aires—where she attended the National Academy of Fine Arts—and Paris, where she studied from 1951 to 1956 at the Académie Ranson. After having her first solo exhibition in 1958, she won the Young Painting Prize in Paris in 1955. However, the Beasts and Explosions series anticipated her departure from painting, a decision she would make just a year later, in 1964, following her exhibition L'Incitation à la massacre in Paris. With these final paintings, she believed she had reached “the limits of the possibility of communicating any political, social, ecological or other message through painting.” As Lublin would later explain, the works conveyed fear of destruction and human stupidity—and yet, they were still purchased and hung in the homes of bourgeois families.

From 1965 onward, after abandoning painting, the artist began what she called her “parcours conceptuel,” or “conceptual journey,” with works such as Voir Clair (1965), Mon Fils (1968), Fluvio Subtunal (1969), and Cultura: Dentro y Fuera del Museo (1971). After the tormented figures and images of a world in crisis and on the brink of ultimate destruction, Lea Lublin turned toward an artistic path far from painting, marked by strong participatory and playful dimensions.

—Agustín Diez Fischer