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HENRIQUE FARIA 
35 East 67th Street 
4th Floor 
10065 New York

 

 

Horacio Zabala is a conceptual artist who lives in Buenos Aires,
Argentina. Trained as an architect, he frequently incorporates into his work architectural plans or representations of the built environment evoked through language or signs. Zabala's interest in physical structures elicits an exploration of the very purpose and utility of artistic expression, while also gesturing outwards to the political situation in his native Argentina. Indeed, the earliest works in this show were created amidst a thriving backdrop of conceptualism and systems art, as well as of the socio-political context of political oppression, between the fall of one dictatorship and the beginning of another. Rodrigo Alonso suggests that the work points to the risk of complicity that architecture runs in the case of being placed at the service of an authoritarian system."[2] This makes Zabala's interest in the architecture of oppression or safety--the jail or the bomb shelter--all the more poignant.

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