Alicia Carletti

You are looking at the work La Duquesa de Tenniel (“Tenniel’s Duchess”), by the Argentine artist Alicia Carletti.

Alicia Carletti was born in San Isidro, Buenos Aires, in 1949.

A painter and engraver, Carletti stands out for her role in the magical realism movement.

With a figurative language and a fantastical aesthetic, Carletti structures her work into series, grouping her artistic ideas into themes that she represents almost obsessively. From the start, we see how her depictions of lonely, empty houses, huge and frightening mushrooms, even little girls dressed in women’s clothes and accessories, were, over time, to share the limelight with landscapes based on flowers and toys.

The influence of Lewis Carroll’s magical realism on her work is clear. It had such an impact on her that she dedicated a whole series of paintings to him in which she reinterpreted illustrations from the novel Alice in Wonderland, incorporating elements of its iconographic language, such as solitary girls dressed as women.

In her work La Duquesa de Tenniel, as well as in all of her Alice in Wonderland series, we see how Carletti recreates the aesthetic of illustrations from the novel, incorporating her signature elements, such as enormous flowers and the aforementioned girl-women. These characters sometimes burst onto the scene as observers, and at other times in an attitude that is completely alien to it.

Alicia Carletti died in her country of birth in 2017.