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Familia
Carlos Arias Vicuña
Family
Since the 1990s, Carlos Arias Vicuña shifted from painting to embroidery to question two fundamental phenomena: genre, in the sense of artistic disciplines, and the sexual gender of representation.
Familia depicts identity as a set of knotted threads: the bond of the umbilical cord that connects the child’s bodily fluids to the image of a phallic mother, suggesting the impossibility of escaping the flow of genealogical ghosts and identifications. An allegory of the painful path that always tries to return to the source, helpless to stop connecting the artistic with the sexual, and the political.
CARLOS ARIAS VICUÑA (1964)
Familia, 1995–1996
Family
Embroidery on cloth
Gift of the artist, 2016
