Léa Lublin
1929 - 1999
Born in Brest (PL), died in Paris (FR), lives in Buenos Aires (AR), lives in Paris (FR).
Argentine artist Léa Lublin belongs to a long list of cultural producers and intellectuals who, for most of the sixties and seventies, decided to exchange the political instability of their Latin American home countries for the relative prosperity and security of Western Europe, adding a tinge of political urgency and existential, nomadic anxiety to the post-conceptual art practices that were then in full bloom in their newly adopted host countries. Lublin spent many years in Paris, where she was able to further immerse herself in the Surrealist legacy, the defining pedagogical experience of her art career; growing up in Buenos Aires, she must surely have been aware of Marcel Duchamp’s short but much-publicized sojourn in the Argentine capital. Sometime in the mid-seventies, Lublin started to make regular trips to Antwerp to partake in ICC’s performance art program, and on one of these visits she exhibited a piece of white cloth containing a questionnaire made up of questions such as What is art?, wrapped around the statue of Rubens on Antwerp’s Groenplaats. This work was first shown again in the historical survey show “Dear ICC” in 2004, alongside a similar questionnaire-based work by Belgian artist Daniël Dewaele.
