Mercedes Azpilicueta is a visual and performance artist from Argentina based in The Netherlands. Her artistic practice brings together various characters from the past and the present, who manifest as voices, shapes, texts, traces and memories into her multi-layered works. Calling herself a “dishonest researcher”, Azpilicueta navigates through multiple references and fields of knowledge, from art history to popular music, literature to street culture, falling in love with dissident figures and trajectories — feminist, queer, migrant, exiled individuals — who haunt her scripts, performances and videos.
In 2018 she presented her first major solo exhibition at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. She received the Pernod Ricard Fellowship, Paris in 2017 and was artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam in 2015-16. She has an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute/ArtEZ, Arnhem (2013), and a BFA from Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires (2007); where she also did the Artists´ Program 2009-10 at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Exhibitions and performances include, among others, REDCAT Gallery (Los Angeles, 2018), Villa Vassilieff (Paris, 2018), MACBA (Barcelona, 2018), MUSEION (Bozen, 2018), Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo (Móstoles, 2017), Onomatopee (Eindhoven, 2016), TENT (Rotterdam, 2015), Móvil (Buenos Aires, 2015), Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, 2014) and Het Veem Theatre (Amsterdam, 2014). In 2019 she will present her first major solo exhibition in Europe at CentroCentro, Madrid; and a solo presentation as part of Positions #5 at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.