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Bernardo Oyarzún – Negro Curiche

By 4 de September de 2024September 6th, 2024No Comments


Title: Negro Curiche
Year: 2002
Technique: Photoperformance, 310 g Canson Luster paper
Size: 100 x 100 cm each

Chile, 1963. Visual artist with national and international recognition. He has held over 25 international exhibitions and participated in over 20 art biennials, standing out at the Venice Biennale as Chile’s pavilion representative; the Havana Biennial, Cuba; Valencia Biennial, Spain; Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador, and the Prague Biennial, Czech Republic, among others.

He has exhibited in several countries such as New Zealand, Germany, the United States, and Bolivia. In Chile, has held solo exhibitions at Galería AFA, Galería Metropolitana, the University of Talca, Matucana 100, the National Center of Contemporary Art, among- others. His work is part of the collection of the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage, the Blanton Museum of Art, and the Daros Latinamerica Collection.


“When I was a child, they called me ‘negro curiche’,” Bernando Oyarzún narrates. Curiche is a Mapdungun word that means “black people”. This nickname based on his appearance increasingly worsened in time and became evident through several forms of discrimination linked to the artist’s skin color or physical features, which translated into arbitrary police detentions, or disbelief in his being a college student, among others.

The racism experienced in his story has shaped both his life and that of many Chileans. In Bernardo’s case, the breaking point was when he was detained as the suspect of a crime. This situation led him to make a series of pieces, including Negro Curiche, where he questions the colonizing model, vindicating indigenous or mestizo bodies. In his own words, “I wanted to know if my body would perfectly fit into a square and a circle,” which is why we can see the Vitruvian man with an indigenous body on one hand, and, on the other part of the diptych, we can read the nicknames Oyarzún was called as a child, linked to his native origin. Thus, he manages to propose a new canon for proportions and identity.