• Catalina Chervin

    Born 1953 in Corrientes, Argentina. Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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  • Drawings: 2012 - 2019

     Drifting closer toward abstraction, her compositions began to evince a sketchy, spontaneous quality that produced compelling tensions with areas of painstaking detail. Despite these new formal occurrences, Chervin did not fully abandon her twisted, humanoid forms, nor did she relinquish the themes of existential struggle central to her earlier works. Indeed, the artist’s more recent drawings demonstrate her continued preoccupation with beginnings, endings, and hauntings, as well as psychological and physical tensions. 

  • Early Works

    1980s-1990s

    Chervin’s drawings from the late 1980s and early 1990s contain surreal, chaotic scenes that evoke origin myths; her compositions gesture toward cataclysmic events that prompt the suffering of both humanity and the spirit world. This imagery is at once universal and highly personal: Chervin is the descendant of Russian Jews who immigrated to Argentina - uprooting their lives to escape the Holocaust. Chervin herself endured the oppression and violence of Argentina’s civic-military dictatorship. The visual lexicon that Chervin developed within her early works seems to draw from these histories of trauma and distress to create emotionally charged, symbolic narratives around human mortality. 

  • Catalina Chervin in her studio, Buenos Aires

    Portraits by Sebastián Szyd, 2012
  • 'Black conjures up ideas of evil, death, nightmares, the night itself and final obliteration. Nonetheless, it also suggests the softness...

    Catalina Chervin, Untitled II (About Darkness Series), 1994 - 2014, Hannae Brand Collection, Singapore

    "Black conjures up ideas of evil, death, nightmares, the night itself and final obliteration. Nonetheless, it also suggests the softness of the evening and the potential comforts of the end of time as we know it. While there are certainly instances in the art of Catalina Chervin of the graphic line and evocations of worlds beyond our own paltry vision of the cosmos in which color (sometimes red) makes an incursion, it has for decades been her reliance on blackness that has dramatically informed her work."

    Edward J. Sullivan, Ph.D, excerpt from "Catalina Chervin and the Urgency of Black," Atmósferas & Entropía, 2020

  • Catalina Chervin: Catharsis

    Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary
  • Details of Chervin's studio

    Photographed by Sebastián Szyd
  • 'So what does Chervin bring out of the dark? Multitudes of figures, towers, fissures, clouds, storm-bursts, tangled roots, all drawn...

    Catalina Chervin, Untitled (Apocalypse series), 2003

    "So what does Chervin bring out of the dark? Multitudes of figures, towers, fissures, clouds, storm-bursts, tangled roots, all drawn with exquisite precision. Explosions of matter comparable to Leonardo da Vinci’s late drawings of catastrophic natural disasters. Landscapes both delicate and terrifying. She gives visual form to states of mind, dramatizing the meeting between the personal and the cosmic.

    Chervin’s drawings retain their mysteries. Part of it is scale: are the forms we see unimaginably immense? Or are we looking through a microscope? Similarly, trying to grasp their subjects fully is like attempting to recall a dream, the events of which unravel and slip out of our grasp. But these works hold us under their spell with the remarkable power of their atmosphere, and with the truths they insistently whisper about the nature of the human spirit. The ghosts that haunt Catalina Chervin’s drawings compel us to keep looking."

    Susan Owens, excerpt from Atmósferas & Entropía, 2020 

  • MACBA I Retrato en movimiento: Catalina Chervin

    Interview of Catalina Chervin by Ángel Navarro, Curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Buenos Aires, about her exhibition "Atmósferas & Entropía"  for their "Retrato en movimiento" series, 2020

  • '[Catalina Chervin's] pictures are neither entirely abstract nor anywhere near representational; her imagery at once allusive and elusive. Her works...

    Catalina Chervin, Untitled I (Street Art Series), 2014-16

    "[Catalina Chervin's] pictures are neither entirely abstract nor anywhere near representational; her imagery at once allusive and elusive. Her works are appositional no-man’s lands, disturbed by destructive techniques which have offered artists aesthetic strategies fused with emotional coping mechanisms in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust.

    Clearly the worlds Chervin invents in her graphic art are as strong as they are vulnerable, as obsessive as poignant. Perhaps the juxtapositions and contradictions that have attached themselves to her work begin to explain the curious duality between artist and the subjects of her art...."

    Norman L. Kleeblatt, excerpt from "Catharsis," Atmósferas & Entropía, 2020

     

  • Prints

    The formal shifts that occurred in Chervin’s drawings after 2000 can be found in her prints, as well. The artist’s mark making—both meticulous and fluid—produces a new kind of density, and shadows seems to emerge as presences, rather than voids. Her prints often invoke higher powers and dark forces that coalesce, dissolve, and drift— shifting populations and landscapes around them as they rise and fall. Chervin has also created “portfolios” from specific groups of prints: Apocalypsis (2004), Canto (2010-2011), and IT (2015). These portfolios combine the artist’s etchings with the poetry and writings of Fernando Arrabal, Itzhak Katzenelson, and Clarice Lispector. In this context, Chervin’s prints transcend the realm of visual art to become texts—pages in a larger narrative—weaving through, expanding, and illuminating the written language with which they are juxtaposed.

     

  • In New York, Chervin worked at Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop (now a part of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts)...

    Catalina Chervin with Robert Blackburn circa 1999.

    In New York, Chervin worked at Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop (now a part of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts) and with printmaker Takuji Hamanaka. She has also collaborated at the workshops of master printers Lothar Osterburg (2004, 2010, 2015), Kathy Caraccio (2003) and recently with master printer Devraj Dakoji, at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop (2015 to 2018).

     

  • Printmaking with Devraj Dakoji, New York

  • 'Chervin describes her practice as an effort 'to understand the graphic chaos which is my interlocutor when I begin a...
    Catalina at work, photographed by Sebastián Szyd

    "Chervin describes her practice as an effort 'to understand the graphic chaos which is my interlocutor when I begin a dialogue with a blank sheet.' This balance between chaos and the blank sheet, entropy and order, is revealed in the precise lines, careful shading, and “accidental” imprints – drips and smudges carefully calibrated into the composition – that extend across the paper, drawing viewers into seemingly timeless spaces, inviting careful and considered examination. Indeed, Chervin’s artworks evoke a sensation of deep perspectival space that alternately conjures forth landscapes, emotional states, or haunting presences."

     Susanna V. Temkin, Ph.D, excerpt from Catalina Chervin, Atmospheres and Entropy: Works on Paper, Cecilia De Torres, LTD., 2016

  • Collage

    While Chervin’s oeuvre primarily comprises drawings and prints, she has also created a number of large-scale collage works. This medium is a logical, rich extension of her drawing and printmaking practices; collage allows Chervin to deepen the physicality inherent in her work. Employing etching techniques to excavate printing plates or erasing with such force that paper supports disintegrate, her surfaces often possess a geological quality. In Chervin’s collaged works, the heightened contrasts between smooth and rough, uniform and heterogeneous, endow each composition with a sculptural quality. The tactility of these works recalls the layered notices and advertisements found on the walls of urban settings. Here, however, the message is transcendent— rather than diverting our attention to commodities or entertainment, we are redirected inward. Chervin encourages us to seek our own answers in the protrusions and shadows of her mysterious, ambiguous spaces.

  • On Discarded Skin, By Marta Merajver Kurlat, January 2022

    Untitled I (Discarded Skin Series), 2020-21, Charcoal, pencil and walnut ink on Lanaquarelle paper 59 3/50 x 41 17/50 in

    On Discarded Skin

    By Marta Merajver Kurlat, January 2022

    ON DISCARDED SKIN

    Wrapped in skin

    Not mine, and yet

    As mine as bones

    And blood and cells

    That shaped my being

    In the wondrous world

    I trod the path

    I carved the signs

    I hummed the song

    Of life and love

    And tears and woe.

    I did not hear

    The skin rebel,

    Its oozing pores

    Cracking in pain,

    Screaming “no more”,

    Claiming for truth

    In vain, for deaf and blind

    I clung to it year out year in.

    That skin not mine

    First scaled, then wilted,

    Then shed and turned

    Into specks of dust

    Afloat in an alien sea.

    An empty, not-me sea.

    I did not know

     

    A cleansing force

    Had been at work

    To free me of delusion

    While weaving my me-skin,

    The one I wear now

    No longer deaf,

    No longer blind.

    Download the poem here
  • 'There is a void in my work, the expression of a void that is filled with forms. Forms that seem...

    Portrait of Catalina Chervin in her studio, photographed by Sebastián Szyd

    "There is a void in my work, the expression of a void that is filled with forms.

     

    Forms that seem to be organs, birds, fragments of a human body cut into a thousand pieces, monsters of their own mythology, landscapes, towers from which the horde falls and disperses, creating a world and flooding space. Forms that make up a sinuous fabric assembled by gagging on themselves, where each figure begets itself and engenders another simultaneously to infinity.

    My drawings are also cut strokes, torn papers, cracked, wounded, with subtle lines that scream from the depths of the story itself, from my own story. For I was told one story and lived another. The story told by my grandparents and my mother, persecuted and exiled Russian Jews. A story, perhaps not so different from the one I lived myself, very close by, living in Buenos Aires during the military dictatorship in my country, in the seventies, a story that brought me too close to cruelty and terror forcing me into hiding and self-exile. Strokes that are woven and mark my work/a labyrinth in which I am reflected.

     

    The fabric of infinite details present in my work is the terrain upon which I draw and construct these images of the world that emerge from the secret belief in hope and beauty."

     

    Catalina Chervin on her practice, 2020

  • Atmósferas & Entropía , Catalina Chervin: 1998 - 2020

    Atmósferas & Entropía

    Catalina Chervin: 1998 - 2020

    View additional works and read complete texts by scholars such as Catalina Chervin, Joshua Halberstam, Norman L. Kleeblatt, Robert C. Morgan, Marietta Mautner Markhof, Ángel Navarro, Susan Owens and Edward J. Sullivan. View here.

  • Listen to Catalina Chervin discuss her workin in "Atmósferas y Entropía" at The Museum of Contemporary Art Buenos Aires. The exhibition ran from March 6, 2020 through February 14, 2021. 

    MACBA | ATMÓSFERAS Y ENTROPÍA I CATALINA CHERVIN

    The Museum of Contemporary Art Buenos Aires | Atmospheres and Entropy | Catalina Chervin
  • Los comienzos del cuerpo, Presentación de Atmósferas & entropía de Catalina Chervin

    por Gonzalo Aguilar

                Hace no mucho tiempo, una amiga me comentó que Catalina Chervin estaba preparando una serie de obras inspiradas en Clarice Lispector. El encuentro de Catalina con Clarice me resultó afortunado, previsible, casi diría que natural, porque aún sin ver las obras en cuestión pensé que en ambas había un problema que, cada una en sus prácticas artísticas específicas, trataba de solucionar: cómo poner el cuerpo. Cómo poner el cuerpo en aquello que le es heterogéneo, sea la escritura narrativa en el caso de Clarice, o el dibujo y las artes plásticas en el de Catalina. Porque frente a lo que parece la solución relativamente fácil que propone la performance, que es poner el cuerpo, tal vez lo que se pierde es que un cuerpo no es necesariamente los miembros, la carne, el armazón óseo o la insistencia orgánica sino algo más y que por eso los caminos para llevar el cuerpo—insisto, a la escritura o al dibujo—pueden ser complicados, más aún cuando perdimos la fe en las representaciones más o menos académicas, representativas o figurativas que en realidad no nos acercan a los cuerpo sino que nos alejan de ellos. Atmósferas & entropía, el libro que presentamos hoy, ensaya por lo menos dos maneras de poner el cuerpo. Con la figuración—no con las figuras—y con el trazo.

                Con la figuración porque en muchas de las obras se anuncian acá o allá, figuras humanas, fragmentos de cuerpos u órganos que parecen más raíces o rizomas o algo que podríamos llamar tentáculos, pero esto es solo una metáfora porque son cuerpos, o fragmentos que anuncian cuerpos que todavía no son cuerpos, que todavía no tienen nombre, como muchas de las obras, que no tienen título. No tienen título pero sí tienen título las series a las que pertenecen (Apocalipsis, Street Art, Las pequeñas marcas, La oscuridad), como si fueran declinaciones mudas de dimensiones en la que palabras, figuras y cuerpos todavía no se ven, no se anunciaron (la oscuridad) o ya dejaron de ser (apocalipsis). En “Sin título III, serie La oscuridad” se adivina por ejemplo lo que parece ser una mujer en cuclillas pero que observada más detenidamente no es una mujer ni está en cuclillas, es más bien una forma orgánica amenazante como la cucaracha de Clarice Lispector, un fragmento de vida de un órgano sin cuerpo. Eso es lo que sucede en las obras de Catalina si las miramos, erróneamente, a través de la tradición figurativa: son sólo anuncios o insinuaciones que se ocultan ni bien creemos reconocerlas y que nos dejan en un umbral: en el blanco del papel que está en casi todas las obras y que las “pequeñas marcas” no logran ocupar, no pueden suprimir.

                Por eso, más que el cuerpo como figura, la segunda vía es la que termina dominando. El cuerpo no es una figura (la figura nunca se forma, nunca aparece, nunca se nos entrega) sino un trazo, una “pequeña marca” (para usar la expresión de otra de las series).

                No me parece baladí recordar que Clarice Lispector inicia La pasión según GH con seis guiones, como si las palabras ya no fueran suficientes pero tampoco la conciencia, esa supuesta interioridad. Lo que nos sale al encuentro es esa marca (una serie de pequeñas líneas) que es el testimonio de que allí hay una escritora que está dejando una materia gráfica, una materia que no admite concepto. En Catalina, toda la obra está llena de pequeñas marcas, trazos diminutos que se superponen, que traen oscuridad. El lápiz, la tinta, el carbón, todos los negros con su propia materialidad, su modo diferente de recorrer el papel y de agruparse formando territorios muy abigarrados, melancólicos como el sol negro del que hablaba Gérard de Nerval.

                En la serie “Las grandes marcas”, a medida que se avanza, se invierte el procedimiento: la marca es lo que no está dibujado, lo que no es trazo. Los blancos que parecen arrancados, como si hubiese una cinta que se saca y que queda entonces como vacío. En Huella digital podría ser desde un dedo gigante o nervaduras que recuerdan a una hoja. Acá es la falta de trazo, la rasgadura o el corte. Si el cuerpo es el trazo, la mano que podemos sentir que hace un recorrido, que deja una marca; en esta serie es lo que se extrae, lo que está ahí pero escamoteado.

                ¿Qué es el cuerpo entonces? Lo que deja una marca. Lo que se da a la mirada como una marca: un trazo o un blanco que fue habitado por un trazo, un gesto, una mano que concentra toda la vibración de un cuerpo que dibuja. Es una imposibilidad que revela una potencia. Clarice Lispector lo dice en su libro más extraño, Agua viva: “Al escribir no puedo fabricar como en la pintura, cuando fabrico artesanalmente un color. Pero estoy intentando escribirte con todo el cuerpo, enviando una flecha que se clava en el punto blando y neurálgico de la palabra. Mi cuerpo incógnito te dice: dinosaurios, ictiosauros y plesiosaurios, con sentido solo auditivo, sin que por ello se conviertan paja seca, sino húmeda. No pinto ideas, pinto lo más inalcanzable “para siempre”. O “para nunca”, es lo mismo. Antes, pinto pintura. Y antes de eso te escribo dura escritura”.

                Figuraciones y trazos, toda una lucha, un combate del cuerpo para conquistar el blanco de la tela. Lo que Catalina en el texto que introduce el libro llamó el vacío. “Hay un vacío en mi obra, la expresión de un vacío que se llena de formas”. Pero estas formas son, en definitiva, informes, porque el cuerpo nunca está ahí, están sus huellas o las vibraciones que llegan al ojo del que mira. Podríamos decir de nosotros, que contemplamos la obra, lo que escribió—una vez más—Clarice en La pasión según GH: “Atrapada allí dentro por una red de vacíos, olvidaba de nuevo el plan de ordenamiento que me había propuesto, no sabía con certeza por dónde comenzar”. Por dónde comenzar. Una buena pregunta para un libro que se llama Atmósferas & entropía. Atmósfera es lo que no tiene comienzo, entropía es lo que ya comenzó y no tiene vuelta atrás. Entonces, dónde comienza el cuerpo. Por dónde comenzar. Las obras de Catalina Chervin nos responden: por cualquier lado, por un gesto, un trazo, una huella, para ocupar el vacío y, al mismo tiempo, revelarlo.

  • Catalina Chervin in her Studio

  • About Catalina Chervin

    Catalina Chervin, photo courtesy of Pato Parodi

    About Catalina Chervin

    Catalina Chervin (b. 1953, Argentina) studied at the Escuela Nacional Superior Ernesto de la Cárcova in Buenos Aires from 1973 to 1979, trained by Argentine artists including Kenneth Kemble and Emilio Renart amongst others. In New York, Chervin worked at Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop and with printmaker Takuji Hamanaka. She has also collaborated at the workshops of master printers Lothar Osterburg (2004, 2010, 2015), Kathy Caraccio (2003) and recently with master printer Devraj Dakoji, at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop (2015 to 2018).

    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). Chervin has exhibited widely, with group and individual exhibitions across Latin America, the United States, and Europe; including the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Buenos Aires (2020-2021); El Museo del Barrio in New York (2017); the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C. (2016); the Museo Judío in Buenos Aires (2016); and the Drawing Center in New York (2014). Chervin’s works can be found in the collections of numerous institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the New York Public Library; El Museo del Barrio, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; Achembach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Blanton Museum of Art (University of Texas), Austin; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The British Museum, London; and The Graphische Sammlung, Albertina, Vienna.