The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is pleased to present Ulises Beisso: (Hidden) in Plain Sight. Marking the first exhibition of the visionary Uruguayan artist Ulises Beisso (1958–1996) in the United States, this exhibition focuses on his introspective final work, produced following his travels to New York in the mid-1990s. Developed in the aftermath of Uruguay’s military dictatorship and against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, Beisso’s work from this period offers a poignant meditation on the vulnerability and visibility of the body between private and public space.
Celebrated in local circles during his lifetime, Beisso was a singular figure within Montevideo’s art scene in the 1980s and ’90s. He developed a unique aesthetic sensibility that subverted social norms, exploring topics of queer sexuality and spirituality through an exuberantly inventive approach to figuration. In a prolific output that ranged from elaborate sculptures of fictive demigoddesses to vibrant paintings of otherworldly beings, Beisso conveyed an imaginative and all-encompassing form of world-building.
Bringing together thirty-four paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from between 1994 and 1996, the exhibition is organized around Beisso’s decisive 1995 trip to New York, where he encountered the work of a generation of artists confronting the AIDS epidemic, including Ross Bleckner and Félix González-Torres. Struck by their distinct artistic formal approaches to grief and the body, he began the stirring series Imagenes de lo (mi) escondido, on view in this exhibition. Depicting the same solitary semi-nude male figure against a black celestial backdrop, the series explores the entangled themes of pleasure and pain, visibility and invisibility, interiority and exteriority. Here, it is presented in dialogue with works that engage similar topics, while archival materials—photographs, catalogues, press clippings, and sketches from the Ulises Beisso archive at ISLAA—offer insight into this critical moment of transformation.
Beisso’s work was preserved by his family members after his death in 1996 and has only recently begun to receive broader recognition, with major solo exhibitions at SUBTE in Montevideo, curated by Pablo León de la Barra, and at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, curated by Martin Craciun. This exhibition, mounted thirty years after the artist’s death, revisits his little-known output, placing his final work within a broader continuum of artists reflecting on the material limits of the body and our capacity to transcend them.
Ulises Beisso: (Hidden) in Plain Sight is curated by Mariano López Seoane with Olivia Casa, with assistance from Micaela Vindman. It is accompanied by an original publication and will coincide with the release of a new facsimile edition of the artist’s sketchbook.
