The Erased Museum of Art

Catalog for exhibition at Galeria Cultura y Libertad, Lima, Peru, June 1970. In the late 1960s –a moment of political and cultural transformation in Peru– some artists in Lima, who had originally been painters, adhered to a perspective of rupture from the direction and image of the city’s restricted art scene. In this context, through a simple yet eloquent image, artist Emilio Hernández Saavedra managed to capture one of the critical nodes of the artistic process in Peru at that moment: the absence of a Museum of Modern Art and, as an extension of that same idea, of any sort of institutionality in Peru (it should be reminded that from 1968 to 1979 the country was subject to a military dictatorship). This catalog, which serves as the support for an image that features an empty space where the building that houses the current Museo de Arte de Lima should be, creates an open graphic irony in which the building’s “erasure” stands for the obliteration of more than one aspect of the local reality. Turning a minimal graphic gesture into a powerful declaration, Hernández Saavedra, at that time a “pop artist” who also worked with conceptualism, went beyond the institutional void and made the catalog –a key support for the museological institution– the basis of his proposal.