DANIEL LOPEZ CURATED BY MARIO NAVARRO JUNE 1 – JUNE 30, 2007

Artists: Francisca Benitez / Mónica Bengoa / Nicolas Grum / Instituto Divorciado / Ivan Navarro / Rodrigo Pereda / Caterina Purdy / Camilo Yáñez

White Box is pleased to present the exhibition Daniel Lopez, a group show curated by Mario Navarro. Beyond, underneath and behind the show’s title – Daniel Lopez – looms the question: Who Is Daniel Lopez?

Contrary to New York artists, in Chile all young artists know who Daniel Lopez was: the last pseudonym of dictator Augusto Pinochet. The generation of artists shown at White Box may not have had a direct experience of Pinochet’s bloody Coup d’Etat followed by decades of military regime. However, their experience is to a degree informed and shaped by their peers, their family members and friends’, all those earlier artists who had to seek political asylum elsewhere or worse, the film makers, writers, composers who disappeared or spent years in jail.

This generation has instead experienced the after-math of Pinochet’s public trial ending with his death in a Military Hospital, December 2006 at age 91. To them Daniel Lopez was only one of Pinochet’s pseudonym’s  – used specifically for the dictator’s Riggs Bank Accounts in Virginia, next to DC, in which Pinochet amassed 16 million dollars in just one CD. In the post-Pinochet era of today the selected artists have subverted Pinochet’s pseudonym by making it the title of the exhibition, turning his would-be name into an umbrella – a departure for a range of ideas associated with, spinning off or relating directly to the morphing of identities, bending Daniel Lopez into multiple and complex other directions. The exhibition also demonstrates how younger generations of artists from Chile feel free to work in any and several mediums at the same time varying from site-specific wall mural painting, audio and video work, drawing, sculpture and photography.

The exhibition has received generous support from Fondart, ProChile, Alfredo Jaar and an anonymous donor, with special thanks to Monica Lorduy.

WHITE BOX is a 501 (c) (3) not-for-profit organization. Your donations are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. Annual exhibitions are supported in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with additional annual organization funds from The Rockefeller Brothers Fund.