Juana Elena Diz was a painter, printmaker, and ceramicist born in Argentina in 1925, whose work focused on the general solitude of Indigenous working women. Like other members of the Grupo Espartaco, Diz draws from a host of formal and pictorial references, creating in Lavandera a portrait of an Indigenous woman in a static position with disproportionate features and earthy tones. Diz not only incorporates a sense of monumentality with the woman’s geometric form, from which she usually experiments with their contours, but she also crafts a decolonised representation of the female body by using the visual vocabulary of modernism. In this painting, Diz captures a moment of introspection that interrupts the burden of work. It’s a signature characteristic of her work: women are frequently represented with vacant expressions, locked in their thoughts, memories, and dreams, perhaps experiencing a fleeting sense of freedom.
This is the first time the work of Juana Elena Diz is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Nicolas Cuello
