Victoria Colmegna at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS

Park View / Paul Soto are proud to announce a solo project of new and recent works by the Argentinian artist Victoria Colmegna (b. 1986), organized at our shared Brussels annex, La Maison de Rendez-Vous. Victoria Colmegna’s project will be installed at the gallery as of Saturday November 21, which will mark the show’s opening, and it will continue until Saturday, January 16th, 2021.

Victoria Colmegna is keenly interested in youth culture and adolescence, in particular how identity is shaped through dramatic push-and-pull acts of social affiliation or, conversely, defiance. Her artworks are placeholders where these dynamics unfold, sometimes in their extreme forms – fanatic devotion or betrayal. Colmegna’s project at the gallery includes a chapter of her newest work, Etiquette class at collectors’ houses, a series of videos that serve as frenetic instruction guides in how to conduct oneself as an artist within the social milieu.

This focus on class, and how it colonizes and controls the body, relates to Colmegna’s Sweet Valley High works, which are also on view in the space. This series of collaged paintings in bulletin board lockboxes was developed from the artist’s epistolary relationship with the illustrator of the same-named books, a YA serial about a pair of American teenage girls living out their high school antics in the fictionalized “Valley.” Growing up in Buenos Aires, Colmegna was passionately devoted to the books, which consequently shaped her own coming-of-age. In these works, Colmegna places herself front-and-center within the framework of their narrative. She displays original graphite proofs and archival photographs of the books’ characters next to pastel portraits of herself developed alongside the illustrator. The latest versions in this series of works interweave Colmegna into scenes from 19th century French painting, bringing to light historical treatments of women as artists and subjects within the medium, as well as Colmegna’s own self-referential artistic position-taking within this context.

Victoria Colmegna (Argentinian, born in 1986) lives and works in Buenos Aires. Her works have been exhibited at schwarzcafé at LUMA Westbau, Zürich; Company Gallery, New York; Aguirre Gallery, Mexico City; Centre d’art Contemporain – la synagogue de Delme, France; Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zürich; Ludlow 38, Goethe Institute, New York; Park View/Paul Soto, Los Angeles; Freedman Fitzpatrick Gallery, Los Angeles; Truth & Consequences, Geneva; and Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid, among others. Colmegna’s work is currently on view in “Haunted Haus” at the Swiss Institute in New York. Her works are included in the collections of the LUMA Foundation, Zürich; and the Bunker Collection, West Palm Beach.