Catalina Chervin

Catalina Cherin (Born in 1953 in Corrientes, Argentina; Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Catalina Chervin was born in Corrientes, Argentina, in 1953. She studied at the Escuela Nacional Superior Ernesto de la Cárcova in Buenos Aires from 1973 to 1979, and worked at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York City with artists Takuji Hamanaka (b. 1968) and Devraj Dakoji (b. 1944). Chervin has received numerous fellowships, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (2004 and 2015); the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellowship (2010); and the Fondo Nacional de las Artes Fellowship (Argentina, 2001). In 2015 she was a Visiting Scholar at New York University.

Within her work, Chervin delineates the paradoxical binaries inherent in human phenomenological experience of internal and external space. The coexistence of coalescence and dissolution, growth and decay, and chaos and refinement, become evident in her tangles of delicate lines and primordial patterns. Interwoven organic forms amass or emerge like phantoms behind the two-dimensional picture planes of the artist’s drawings. Whether the image captured is a fleeting, ashen atmosphere or the swirling depths of the female body, Chervin depicts what the human mind intuits rather than what eyes see – thereby replacing empirical knowledge with subconscious feeling. Perhaps for this reason, the artist’s images tend to produce visceral reactions in viewers. 

Chervin has exhibited widely, with group and individual shows across Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Within the past few years, she has participated in exhibitions at the Museo del Barrio in New York City (2017); at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington DC (2016); at the Museo Judío in Buenos Aires (2016); at Palatina Gallery in Buenos Aires; at the Drawing Center in New York City (2014); and at the Kunsthaus Lempertz in Berlin (2013).

Chervin’s work can be found in public and private collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York City; the New York Public Library; the Museo del Barrio, New York City; the Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC; the Blanton Museum of Art (University of Texas), Austin; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), Buenos Aires; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and the Albertina Museum, Vienna.