Amalia Pica

London-based Argentine artist Amalia Pica uses sculpture, performance art, photography, installation, slide projections, and drawing to create works that explore forms of communication, metaphor, and social engagement, with a particular interest in moments of failure, slippage, and mistranslation. Using found materials and everyday objects, such as lightbulbs, cardboard, drinking glasses, and photocopied paper, Pica creates works that are at once playful and conceptually complex.

Pica often uses linguistic and semiotic concepts as points of departure for her projects, probing the various ways that humans attempt to give a concrete form to ideas: in her Catachresis series of sculptures, begun in 2011, for instance, she draws on a literary term, from the Greek word for “abuse,” which describes figures of speech in which a word or expression is employed in a context far outside its original meaning. In Pica’s sculptures, she uses objects whose features are named for parts of the human body, such as the tongue of a shoe, the teeth of a saw, and the legs of a table, highlighting the bizarre anthropomorphizing language grafted onto common objects. In other works, she addresses the social and political aspects of language and systems of communication, often informed by her experience growing up at the time of Argentina’s “Dirty War,” during which thousands of suspected dissidents were jailed or murdered. Pica's work therefore considers the ways in which modes of communication and forms of representation can take on wildly different meanings depending on the contexts in which they are received. 

Pica has been the subject of a solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, and Malmo Konsthall. Her work has also been included in notable group exhibitions, including at the 54th Venice Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, Tate Modern Project Space, PinchuchArtCetre in Kiev, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the Royal College of Art in London, and the 2012 New Museum Triennial in New York. Pica was awarded The Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in 2011.