The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is pleased to announce Claudio Perna: Idea como Arte, the first solo exhibition in New York dedicated to the Venezuelan conceptual artist Claudio Perna (1938–1997). Across a complex and prolific practice ranging from photocopies and Polaroids to collaged maps and conceptual photography, Perna’s work examined the boundary between material record and reality across art and science. Featuring more than forty works from several key series, this exhibition highlights his exploration of documentation, authorship, and national identity, and experimental approach to artistic production, between 1968 and the early 1990s.

Born in Milan, Perna moved to Venezuela as a teenager and studied geography, which informed his explorations of place and nationhood across his work. In his series of collaged maps of Venezuela, on view in this exhibition, he challenged the notion of national identity as fixed, presenting it instead as shaped by personal memory and rooted in lived experience. Starting in the late 1960s, he launched a series of conceptual experiments with photographic technology, in which he investigated the media through which information circulates and accumulates. These works included orchestrated photographic scenes in Fotos dirigidas (1967–68), photocopied self-portraits and impressions of found objects in Autocopias (1973–75), and performative documentation in Fotoinformes (1976–90) and Alineamientos (1976).

By tracing Perna’s conception of the “idea as art”—a commonly used term and unifying principle of the diverse strategies of conceptualism—this exhibition positions his work within an international history of conceptualism and foregrounds a moment of radical artistic experimentation in Venezuela, as artists expanded the languages of abstraction, embraced experimental media, and pursued alternative art forms. In doing so, it highlights Perna’s expansion of artistic production beyond the art object and invites viewers to consider how knowledge is constructed through acts of looking, recording, and reinterpreting—concerns that continue to resonate today amid ongoing debates regarding the circulation of information and the authority of images.

On view from January 31 to May 2, 2026, Claudio Perna: Idea como Arte is curated by Olivia Casa with Clara Prat-Gay.

Image Caption: Claudio Perna, Idea como Arte (Idea as Art), 1976. © Fundación Claudio Perna

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