The Larivière Foundation inaugurates Marcos López. Photographies 1975–2025, the first major anthological exhibition dedicated to the renowned Argentine photographer. Curated by Valeria González, the show brings together over 200 works spanning five decades of creation—from his early years in Santa Fe to a selection of more than fifty images from the last five years, never before exhibited.

The exhibition, which includes fifty photographs from the Foundation’s own collection, offers a comprehensive journey through López’s oeuvre. It encompasses his travels around the world, striking portraits, pop-inspired staged scenes, intervened photographs, and pieces that have left a lasting mark on the collective imagination. Altogether, this body of work reveals the diversity and strength of his vision of Latin American identity.

In the exhibition text, González writes: “It is the perfect moment to revisit the artist who marked one of the origins of contemporary Argentine photography in 1993, when he began his series Pop latino. At that time, there was no Google or Photoshop: proudly embracing marginality, Marcos López appropriated a First World, advertising-style aesthetic—only to mispronounce it, to build cardboard-painted scenes through whose cracks slipped all the irreverence and candor of a peripheral aesthetic. His documentary allegories rekindled, at a key historical moment, the political identity of Latin American photography.”

Belonging to a generation of photographers who witnessed the turning point between analog and digital photography, López persistently explored the aesthetics of precariousness as a sign of the times. A master of irony and subversion, through his staged scenes López questioned the very concept of documentary photography.

“The documentary allegories of Marcos López achieve a unique synthesis between the style of the 1990s and the legacy of Latin American photography, in terms of a commitment to referencing social reality,” writes González in her essay on the artist in Marcos López, published in 2010 by Ediciones Larivière. With thoroughness, the volume traces his production from 1978 to 2009. In this carefully crafted large-format hardcover book, with high-quality reproductions, currently available at the Foundation’s store, the specialist states: “In his work, one can feel the reverberations of a long tradition that spans from Mexican muralism to documentary photography and protest cinema. Nevertheless, for the artist it was not a matter of perpetuating established models, but of reclaiming their semantic power precisely at the moment when these traditions were at risk of solidifying into empty formulas. The Latin American perspective, as we have seen, was a defining element in López’s work from the very beginning.”

His work, internationally acclaimed, is part of prestigious collections such as the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Fondation Cartier (Paris), Tate Modern (London), the Guggenheim Museum and El Museo del Barrio (New York), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and MALBA (Buenos Aires), among many others.

This exhibition, which for the first time occupies both galleries of the Foundation, allows visitors to clearly see how López has built a visual poetics that is at once deeply personal and a mirror of contemporary Latin American identity.

(Text by Marina Oybin)