Gabriel Chaile
Gabriel Chaile studied Visual Arts at the National University of Tucumán. In 2009 he was awarded with a scholarship by Fundación YPF which allowed him to be a part of the first edition of the Artist Program of Torcuato Di Tella University. In 2010 he was selected to participate of Lipac, an art program by Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas. His latest works include Diego, curated by Cecilia Alemani (Art Basel Cities, Buenos Aires, 2018), Sonia (El ondulatorio, La Rioja, 2018), Proto, a movie by Gabriel Chaiel (Galería Ruby, Buenos Aires, 2017), Patricia, curated by Laura Hackel (Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, 2017), My name is legion because we are many (Centro Cultural San Pablo T, Tucumán, 2016), It’s not my fault if it comes from the river (Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires 2015), Leave the furrow to till the earth, delusions of grandeur II (Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires, 2014). Chaile was part of many collective exhibitions in Tucumán, Lima, Montevideo, Paris, Cuenca and Buenos Aires and has participated in art fairs such as arteBA (Buenos Aires), The Armory Show (New York). He lives and works in Buenos Aires.
In the works of Gabriel Chaile there is a critical- poetical intersection between anthropology, the sacred and its rituals, the political, and pre-Columbian communities of South America, interpreted artistically and with certain eccentricity and sense of humor. Gabriel carries out his anthropological and visual research beginning from two key concepts that are present all across the body of his oeuvre. These are the Engineering of Need, consisting on creating objects and structures from art that collaborate in improving the conditions of a certain borderline situation; and the Genealogy of Shape, which implies acknowledging that every object in its historical repetition provides a story to tell, that is recovered and updated in relation to the new context. The artist utilizes both axioms to make sculptures, do paintings, and build big scale installations that allow several communities overshadowed by history and power structures to gain visibility and have a voice. Gabriel acts like a visual anthropologist: he studies his surrounding context, deconstructs it in new morphologies, charges it with new meaning and throws it into the world in the form of objects and images inviting to reflect on the relation between each other.