..Juan Doffo

Focusing his birthplace and using several languages -paintings, photographs, performances with photographs and installations- Juan Doffo has developed a kind of personal cosmogony from which he reaches man with interpretations far away from his geographic territory.
Sometimes Mechita, a small town where he was born in Buenos Aires plains, becomes mitic structures of heaven or hell. Otherwise, Mechita is a womb, cauldron, ravine, vault. At least, they are all questions about human life.
The artist uses some images for reflect and to draw reflections. A thought that soon escapes from reason boundarys: Doffo's works plunge into other ambits, and surround the idea but from sensations. Between the twinkle that grows or extinguish, he express his own self with metaphors, questions related with illusion, passion or both of them.
Doffo sees the world from his own personal experience. From there he builds the simbols of his universe: the unbounded horizon of the "pampas", the crossing of mud streets, the fire, the labyrinthic lecture of stars and constructions from thought and culture that he shows as vaults or big silos made with bricks. They are the reason of his ideas, that don't know the limits between substance and physics.
Visual reflections about the sense of real, illusion, trivial or trascendent, universal or regional; build the images of his artistic work, mostly centered in a metaphysic look of landscape, transformed in a metaphysic territory. The landscape not as a determinated geography but as a psychic one: the landscape as an exact point where interior and exterior merge with all his questions.
The geography of his native land is the furnace where from he constructs concepts that pretend to jump in other lands. It is not a unique space: in there live together reality, dreams and quotations in different aspects of culture. It is the place of transformation and materilization of ideas and dreams. There he talks about the road as destiny, the macroscopic and the microscopic, the certainity of feelings and the terrifying incommensurable, psychological heavens and hells.

Curriculum

Born in 1948 in Argentina, of italian heritage.

Education Background: School of the Fine Arts, Buenos Aires. In 1981 granted a scholarship by the National Museum of Fine Art to live and work in Europe and USA.

Selected Museums Collections: Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. Latin American Art Collection, University of Essex, England. Ulla & Greger Olssen Foundation, Stockolm, Sweden. Gallery of the Americas, Havanna, Cuba. National Museum of Fine Art, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Selected International Group Exhibition: 2004 - Boltax Gallery, New York. 2003- Proa Fundation, Buenos Aires. 2002 - Zeitgenössische Kunst aus Argentinien, Kunststation, Kleinsassen, Germany. 2001 - Art Miami, USA. 1987 - Expo Art, New York, USA. 1986 - Miami Biennial, USA. 1986 – Mu-seum of Fine Art, Montevideo, Uruguay. 1984 - Havanna International Biennial, Cuba. 1981 - Salon Villeparisis, Paris, France.

Selected Solo Exhibitions: 2005: Scope-Art Hamptons, N.Y. 2003 - Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador. 2003 - Recoleta Cultural Center, Buenos Aires. 2002 - Museum of Fine Art of Cordoba, Argentina. 2000 - Van Eyck Art Gallery, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 1998 - Palais de Glace Cultural Center (Retrospective), Buenos Aires.1998 - Virla Cultural Center, Tucuman, Argentina. 1986 - San Telmo Foundation (Retros-pective 1974/1986), Buenos Aires, 1984 - Julia Lublin Art Gallery, Buenos Aires. 1981 - Studio Evergreen Gallery, Amsterdam, Holland. 1980 - Praxis Art Gallery, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Selected Awards: 2004- Prize of Argentine Critics Association .2000 - First Prize, Salta Biennial, Salta Argentina. 2000 - Third Prize, Cordoba Biennial, Cordoba, Argentina. 1996 - First Mention, Buenos Aires Metropolitan Museum, Buenos Aires. 1995 - First Mention, Chandon Biennial, Museum of Fine Art, Buenos Aires. 1993 - Second Prize, National Salon, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 1988 - First Prize, Municipal Salon, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 1986 - Mention, Miami Biennial, Miami, USA. 1986 - Mention, Amalia Fortabat Prize, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 1983 - First Prize, Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 1980 - First Prize, Banco del Acuerdo, Museum of Fine Art, Buenos Aires.