Leandro Katz

Henrique Faria Fine Art is pleased to present Libro Quemado, Leandro Katz’s fourth solo exhibition in the gallery. This exhibition brings together a selection of photographs, works on paper, and video from the 1970s through the present day that demonstrate not only the artist’s continued interest in pushing the boundaries of language and the mystery and allure of the Mayan ruins of Central America, but also show how Katz’s mining of material culture leads him in new directions in his practice. With this breadth of subject matter, Katz wants to show that to him art is a wide subject and open to experimentation.

A Canoe Trip (1970), a series of seven vibrantly colored cibachrome prints from 1970 document the artist’s travels to Mayan ruin sites across Guatemala and symbolizes a journey that connects different places through the act of looking. In The Catherwood Project (1985) he continues his expeditions to the Mayan lands, Katz taking images of the routes and sites that had guided Stephens and Catherwood in their classic accounts of the Yucatán peninsula, and compared them with the shots his camera took of ruins disrupted by the reinvention of archaeologists and restorers, and transformed by the massification of tourism.

As Cuauhtémoc Medina writes in the exhibition text: “It is clear that Katz aspired to create hieroglyphs of a new kind, and that these works were tracing the possibility of an early postcolonial conceptual art. Libro quemado (1992), a series of banners produced on handmade paper, seems to be the materialization of that program, including the rescue of the linguistic palimpsest characteristic of colonial chronicles. On the one hand, the multicolored text of the work suggests the ambition of inscribing "the blood of the songs". At the same time, however, the title of the work refers to the destruction of the word that fell back into the hands of the same agents, such as Fray Diego de Landa and the result is a poem of multiple times and multiple voices.”

Following Katz’s belief that “making art demands a total engagement as well as a dedicated resolve to completing one’s quest”, it is only fair that the same should be expected of his viewing audience. So now it is the time to stop reading and to start really looking.

Leandro Katz (Buenos Aires, 1938) is an Argentine/American artist, writer, and filmmaker, known for his films and his photographic installations. His works include long-term projects that deal with Latin American subjects and incorporate historical research, anthropology, and visual arts. Katz's major exhibitions include Encuentros de Pamplona 72: fin de fiesta del arte experimental, Museo Reina Sofía, Spain (2009); Natural History, Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York (2010); Imán-New York, PROA, Argentina (2010); 10,000 Lives, Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2010); A (Los Alfabetos), 11x7 Gallery, Argentina (2011); Raptures, Diagonals and Ruptures, Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Argentina (2013); Intersections (after Lautréamont), CIFO, Miami (2015); Borges: Ficciones de un tiempo Infinito, La Muerte y la Brújula, Centro Cultural Kirchner, Argentina (2016), El rastro de la gaviota, Tabacalera, Spain (2017), Memories of the underdevelopment, Art and the Decolonial turn in Latin America – 1960-1985, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2017), Proyecto para el día que me quieras y la danza de fantasmas, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico (2018), Monumentality, Getty Research Institute, California (2019), Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arts Council of New York, The Jerome Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Leandro Katz has been a member of the faculty at the School of Visual Arts, New York, the Semiotics Program, at Brown University, Rhode Island, and a professor of Film Production and Theory at the School of Art and Communication, William Paterson University, New Jersey. As a New York artist for over four decades, Katz now travels between Los Angeles and Buenos Aires.