Aldunate, Carmen – Chile

1940 | Latin American Art

Biography of Carmen Aldunate

Carmen Zita Aldunate Salas was born in Viña del Mar in Chile’s Valparaíso region in 1940. Better known artistically as Carmen Aldunate, she is one of the main names in the Argentine artistic scene due to her role within the Argentine New Figuration, in spite of her Chilean origins.

She started her studies at the Faculty of Art of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and continued at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile. She later worked as an assistant in the Art Department of the University of California, USA. Throughout her career she has worked as a drawing and painting teacher at the Catholic University, and at various private academies and schools.

Carmen Aldunate’s works

The artist mainly works with the technique of oil on canvas and on wooden boards, although her pencil drawings and collages are also of note.

Clearly influenced by 15th-century Flemish painting, Aldunate combines great technical skill with a narrative rich in psychological and symbolic content. We see this influence in her use of rational drawing, perfection in line and a balance of colour, along with the predominance of foregrounds and backgrounds in an exhaustive vanishing point.

The human figure, in particular females, is the protagonist of Aldunate’s work. Seemingly amiable but with critical content, her pieces use sarcasm and humour to denounce the centuries-old oppression of the female sex that still continues today. She therefore depicts female figures with idealised faces and forms under elegant and flowing clothing, in reference to the demanding and irrational canons of beauty to which women have been subjected throughout history, which she comes back to in her works with a sense of irony.

On other occasions she decontextualises the faces of her female figures, placing them in a frame without a background and even using the non-finite technique. The use of the figure in an extreme close-up without a background as a study of the main figure is also seen in Flemish artists like Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden.

The exploration of individual psychology and states of the soul are also a recurring theme in her work.

 

Silvia Sánchez Ruiz
Curator

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References

http://www.portaldearte.cl/autores/aldunate2.htm

[Date consulted: 05/02/2016]

https://www.ecured.cu/Carmen_Aldunate

[Date consulted: 05/02/2016]