Ana Tiscornia

Ana Tiscornia was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1951. She recalls as a child being influenced by an uncle who worked as an architect and as an early child wanted to grow up to be a construction worker.[1] From 1971 to 1977, she studied architecture at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo and specialized in technical drawings for plumbing systems. During the repressive political climate of the Military Dictatorships of 1973-85, Tiscornia reached out to the Engraving Club at the Montevideo School of Engraving (Escuela Taller de Artes Plásticas Guillermo Fernánde) to connect with other artists who were prevented by the government from assembling.[1] Inside the officially sanctioned meeting places, Tiscornia was free to discuss political ideas[2] and developed her style in a repressed artistic climate.[1] Her 2007 book Vicissitudes of The Imaginary: Between utopia and fragmented identity details her views on the artistic climate in Uruguay at this time. 1986 marked the beginning of Tiscornia gaining artistic recognition, taking prizes at the 2nd Biennial in Havana, Cuba, the 34th Municipal Salon in Montevideo, and winning the first place for the Paul Cézanne Fellowship Award, earning a scholarship to study at Académie de Paris in France.[3] After returning from Paris and gaining attention internationally, Tiscornia began to consider leaving Uruguay, ultimately immigrating to New York City in 1991.[2] In the diverse art world of New York, she began to establish not only her Uruguayan identity, but also her identity in the larger Latin American arts community. A lot of her work from this period in the early 1990s, she says, reflects this growing sense of identity and what it meant to be stereotyped.[2] Having more difficulties in New York, and on the international arts market than back home in Montevideo, Tiscornia began her work as curator for gallery exhibitions as well as teaching in 1996. She is Professor Emeritus from SUNY College at Old Westbury and currently resides in New York City.[3]

Untitled with Sky (six stained glass windows and twelve seats covered in mosaic tiles) by Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia using Willet Hauser Architectural Glass. At the Scarborough station in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

Ana Tiscornia works in a variety of media including painting, sculpting, collage, photography, printmaking, and installation, working with a combination of traditional materials and everyday objects, her works explore Uruguay's complicated political history, emigration, urban spatiality, and identity.

After moving to New York in 1991, Tiscornia's work largely reflects her feelings toward Uruguay's political history during the military dictatorships. Her work prior to leaving Uruguay was largely political and produced in collaboration with the Escuela Taller de Artes Plásticas; this mode of expression was continued in her earliest works after emigrating from her homeland. Her series, Portraits (sometimes referred to as Thirteen Portraits or Trece Retratos) from 1996, consisting of thirteen anonymous photo portraits printed to be near-transparent, has been read as focusing on the forced emigration of political refugees, including the artist's own self-imposed exile. Another examining of the series looks at it in the context of los desaparecidos (the disappeared) from the military dictatorship era [4] and has been featured in a number of expositions dealing with this theme. Tiscornia returned to this theme with a second series in 2000 titled Portraits II/ Retratos II that features another series of thirteen photos, this time of the reverse side of antique photo-frames.

In 1996, Ana Tiscornia exhibited the first of two larger installation works, Camuflajes y olvidos at the [Museo Historico del Cabildo de Montevideo] in which Tiscornia juxtaposed negative space vinyl cutouts of a standing figure with meticulously placed domestic furnishing and household objects encapsulated by a box constructed of clear plastic. The work questions the homes left behind by people either abducted by the government or in exile abroad by highlighting the missing human element of the domestic interior. In the second installation, It Was the End of the Afternoon (1999), Tiscornia constructed a deteriorated room in the Smack Mellon Gallery (Brooklyn, New York). Filling odd cracks and displacements, she placed bits of text that referenced memory illnesses.  

Starting in 2002, Tiscornia began a series of sculptural installation works that situated portions of chairs against walls and floors in such a way that they appear to be half submerged in the fabric of their physical surroundings. This effect of emerging objects appears in a number of her works in the mid-2000s, and includes a series in which she places matte-black hammers as an installation on the wall.

While the abstraction of physical space can be seen in a digital photo series from 2002, in 2007 Tiscornia's work looked to her architectural education by deconstructing the expectations of physical space. In House Project from 2007, she re-assembled cut pieces of a simple wooden model of a house at different angles. This artistic method is repeated again in works such as Situation (2008), For the Time Being (2010), and Untitled with Brick Wall (2012), as well as others, each time further abstracting the concept of physical space. In 2010, Tiscornia began exploring this idea in other media, Black Spots (2010), Red Grid (2011) and others, use cutouts of architectural drawings in order to assemble a collage, rendering the scenes chaotic, but with an underlying geometrical order. In 2011–12 she worked on a series of acrylic paintings that recreated this abstraction and deconstruction of form.

Tiscornia's concern with physical space continues to be explored in other mediums. Starting in 2011, she began using cardboard cutouts of architectural models for her collage work, embracing the three-dimensionality of the medium. Works such as The Project (2011) and Fact of the Matter II (2011) appear to spill off the collage and content with the viewer's physical space, bridging the gap between collage and sculpture.

• Concurso de Pintura Jóven, Galería El Portal. Montevideo, Uruguay. (1982)
• Centro de Innovación y Desarrollo. Montevideo, Uruguay. (1985)
• Premio de Pintura, Honorary Prize. Comunidad Israelita del Uruguay. (1986)
• II Bienal de la Habana, Honorary Prize. Habana, Cuba. (1986)
• XXXIV Salón Municipal de Montevideo. Montevideo, Uruguay. (1986)
• Paul Cézanne Fellowship, First Prize. (1986)
• First Prize for Architectural Design. Feria Industrial Prado 89. Stand Montero S.A. Montevideo, Uruguay. (1989)
• Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. (2000)

Ana Tiscornia has written one book, Vicissitudes of the Visual Imaginary: Between utopia and fragmented identity (White Wine Press, a division of Smart Art Press, Santa Monica, CA. 2007. ISBN 978-84-934236-1-2), and has published a large number of papers on the art of Latin America and Uruguay. She currently works as Art Editor for Point of Contact, The Journal of Verbal and Visual Arts (distributed by Syracuse University Press).

• Official website