The Museo Blanes in Montevideo, Uruguay, is hosting an exhibition dedicated to artist Linda Kohen titled “Exilios.” The exhibition centers around the works by Kohen, where she portrays her experience as an exile in a personal and intimate way.
Kohen was first exiled from Italy in 1939 due to growing antisemitism; she was fifteen years old. Her second exile resulted from the coup-de-etat in Uruguay in 1973; she and her family returned in 1986 after the dictatorships ended.
Kohen’s work focuses on the representation of familiar and domestic spaces, which Kohen strips from the human presence, leaving objects to fill in the absence of those supposed to be there. When the human figure is present, it is primarily a suggestion, a shadow of the individual that remains reticent from the pictorial plane. Stylistically, Cristina Bausero describes Kohen’s work as “a pictorial minimalism that is imposing with the potency of selected resources and of lines that are not leftover.” (Los Exilios, catalogue).
“Los Exilios” will run from May 2023 through August 2023 at Museo Blanes. For more information, you can visit the museum’s page for the exhibition.