Dignora Pastorello: A Strange Modernity

Cecilia Brunson Projects is delighted to present the first London exhibition dedicated to the Argentine artist Dignora Pastorello (1914–2001), bringing together a rare group of paintings spanning four decades of her practice.

This exhibition seeks to recover a forgotten chapter in the history of Argentine modernism. The story of Argentine art in the 1960s is most often told through the lens of the Instituto Di Tella and the conceptual, experimental and avant-garde practices that transformed Buenos Aires into one of the most dynamic cultural centres in Latin America. Yet beyond this now-canonical narrative existed other artistic communities, networks and sensibilities that have largely disappeared from view.

Dignora Pastorello belongs to this overlooked history.

Working alongside a loose network of artists that included Luis Centurión, Ángel Roberto Fadul, Juan Ibarra, Andrés Fernández Taboas and María Vurro, Pastorello inhabited a parallel artistic universe, one that stood apart from the intellectual provocations of conceptual art. Instead, these artists pursued a deeply personal and imaginative form of painting rooted in observation, memory, fantasy and what Centurión termed “Sinisterism”: an understanding of reality in which the ordinary and the mysterious coexist.

While much of Argentine art of the period looked toward technology, politics and the future, Pastorello turned her attention to the intimate world around her. Balconies, staircases, gardens, neighbours, birds and cats become the protagonists of paintings that hover between reality and dream. Familiar places are subtly transformed into stages for unexplained events, where enchantment quietly emerges from everyday life.

Neither fully realist nor surrealist, Pastorello developed a singular pictorial language that resists categorisation. Her paintings reveal an alternative modernity: one in which domestic life, imagination and quiet observation become vehicles for profound mystery.

More than a historical rediscovery, this exhibition proposes a broader understanding of Argentine art in the twentieth century. Through Pastorello’s work, we encounter a parallel modernism—intimate rather than monumental, poetic rather than programmatic, and shaped not by manifestos or movements, but by the persistent transformation of everyday life into something strange, tender and extraordinary.

This exhibition is in collaboration with Daniel Malarkey.