Josefina Guilisasti Chilean , b. 1963

Josefina Guilisasti has developed her pratice in painting and photography, focusing on the problem of how objects are represented in the still life genre.  Whereas still life painting has traditionally relied on a fairly straightforward arrangement of items on a table, what Guilisasti does is to take a less obvious and unitary approach by splitting this classic scene into a way that focuses on the individual existence of certain elements of particular histories, pilgrimages, and individual stories. Guilisasti is deeply aware of the specificity of her medium and the context in which her paintings develop. She collapses references, highlighting the discrepancies between artistic and social discourses. 

In 2017,  Guilisasti presents the exhibition Free Fall, in The Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art. It was a video-installation, which intervened the museum’s permanent exhibition to reflect on the vulnerability of our archaeological heritage and our ambiguous relationship with objects and memory, especially memory of the indigenous Latin American created by creoles and foreigners. It was the first time a contemporary art intervention found its way into the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art. In referring to her creative process, Guilisasti points out: "In filming these images in movement there is a latent reference to the paintings of the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), which are representations of simple objects, with a uniform tonality. I was interested in working with this atmosphere because against a neutral background it provokes uncertainty in the perspective about depth, so that the object stands out as the protagonist of the scene. That’s the key to the relation between painting and video in Free Fall."