What we talk about when we talk about successful women artists. Raquel Forner (Buenos Aires 1940-1988)

TALÍA BERMEJO

Congreso; 2020 UAAC-AAUC Conference; 2020

Universities Art Association of Canada / L Association D Art des Universités du Canada, Co-organized by SFU, UBC and the UAAC Board of Directors

Raquel Forner (1902-1988) has played a central role in the history of Argentine art. Her substantial career has been marked by many awards and extensive media coverage, and has been the subject of numerous academic and critical works. Each stage in her output has been studied from several perspectives, from the paintings framed in the context of early 20th century modern art, through the War series during the 1940s, to the works dedicated to space beings in the 1980s.However, the presence of her work on the art market and in museums has received rather less attention, despite the notable distance differentiating her from other contemporary artists. Forner was very active, not only in the leading galleries in Buenos Aires, but also in her mission to insert her works into the international art circuit, including Canada, where she had a highly productive work stay. Forner negotiated directly with dealers and invested much effort in the sale of her works, a key feature of her career, as it occupied a great deal of her time and helped to cement her self-representation as a professional artist. The purpose of this paper is to examine these aspects in order to better understand the strategies she adopted to make a name for herself in a male-dominated world. I am interested in mapping the commercial circuits where she played such a remarkable role, those where she was able to create new platforms to showcase her work. Likewise, I would like to examine to what extent the market served Forner as a device to access art galleries, while at the same time functioning as a strategy to insinuate the hallmark of a resistant activism into a system governed by the belief that a successful career was incompatible with being a woman.