User:AmyKaminsky/sandbox/Mirta Kupferminc

New article name goes here Mirta Kupferminc

Mirta Kupferminc (b. Buenos Aires, 1955) is an Argentine artist who lives and works in Buenos Aires. Kupferminc has participated in exhibitions in China, Switzerland, Spain, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, Cuba, Brazil, Israel, the United States, Poland, France, Hungary, and England. Her work appears internationally in public collections and museums in Israel, Taiwan, Uruguay, Hungary, the United States, Belgium, Cuba, and Spain.

Kupferminc works across a range of media as a printmaker, painter, sculptor, photographer, installation artist, and videographer. As a sculptor Kupferminc works in fabric, wood, and metal. In her work on paper she has invented printmaking techniques in order to achieve desired effects. One of these techniques produces a pockmarked background in a series of etchings that evoke the searing pain and sense of desolation in post-Holocaust loss and exile, one of the artist’s recurring themes. As emotionally devastating as this work is, Kupferminc’s multidimensional art includes humor in various registers. Works like “Sitting on the Mother of All Chairs” are wry and ironic comments on conventional gender arrangements. Her figures in diaspora, ever circling a perimeter that is sometimes the world, sometimes a hand, sometimes the body of a woman, are often whimsical and endearing. Kupferminc’s award-winning video, “The Name and the Number,” explores the artist’s very personal maternal legacy of both embroidery and tattoos: her Hungarian mother, who instilled in her a love for needlework, was marked with a concentration camp number on her arm. The video followed her installation, "Body Marks" (2007), which juxtaposes tattoos forced upon concentration camp internees during the Holocaust with those that are freely chosen, often for aesthetic reasons.

Kupferminc also works in collaboration; notably with scholar and poet Saúl Sosnowski in their joyful and mysterious “Borges and the Kabbalah” artists’ book, and with novelist and poet Manuela Fingueret in a 2012 installation, “La vida espuma” (Seafoam Life). This two-woman exhibit celebrates their friendship as Fingueret was dying of cancer, demonstrating their mutual respect as artists, each very much her own creative spirit, but in touch with each other’s vision. In a third collaboration, Kupferminc worked with Jorge Meijide, another well-known visual artist, whose style is very different from hers. Between them they presented their separately made pieces as the work of a single, invented figure as a way to comment on the challenges faced by unknown artists in the Buenos Aires art scene. Mirta Kupferminc knows how to be playful and how to be serious, sometimes at the same time. Recurring images of trees, the artist's own hand, chairs, and wings resonate with the recurring themes in her work: exile, migration, memory, and human rights.