The National Museum of Fine Arts will inaugurate on July 8 at 6 p.m. the exhibition Adriana Bustos. Natal chart: the cosmic origins of the Museum, presenting in its first-floor galleries a work specially commissioned from the Argentine artist to celebrate the institution’s 130th anniversary.

Curated by Mariana Marchesi, the temporary exhibition features the monumental drawing Natal Chart of the National Museum of Fine Arts—created with the support of Arthaus—in which Bustos constructs a personal zodiac through reinterpretations of various works from the museum’s collection, many of which will also be displayed in the gallery.

The exhibition also includes the video Pluto in the pump house, which recovers the memory of the building’s underground water reservoirs, and the drawing Celestial Planisphere of the Museum, donated by the Bahía Blanca-born artist to the museum’s collection.

“A work that contains all works. This premise, in a Borgesian key, encapsulates the most recent creation of the Argentine artist Adriana Bustos,” says the Museum’s director, Andrés Duprat. “The artist arranges more than sixty images from the collection according to what she understands as a cosmic order. From each piece she selects certain features, passages, and details, and redraws them. Chosen fragments of paintings, sculptures, and objects that, for the first time in the institution’s history, are brought together in geographical and conceptual proximity, establishing dialogues that cross both physical time and the time of artistic movements.”

“The work by Bustos offers an opportunity to deepen the Museum’s mission: to embrace and make visible the art produced in every historical period while also amplifying the interpretations inspired by its century-old heritage,” the director adds.

“For the celebration of the Museum’s 130th anniversary, Bustos proposed turning to astrology, an ancient body of knowledge that allowed her to reorder and constellation the more than 14,000 works that make up the collection,” explains curator Mariana Marchesi. “To undertake this task, the artist relied on the rigorous methodology that characterizes her practice: research as a guiding principle and cartography as a tool for organizing narratives.”

For this project, Bustos invited writer and astrologer Claudia Aboaf to create the Museum’s natal chart. According to this chart, the institution—founded by decree on July 16, 1895—derives its identity from the Sun in Cancer and the Moon in Taurus, both governed by Venus, goddess of art and beauty. Accordingly, at the center of her zodiacal composition, Bustos places Alfred Philippe Roll’s painting Woman and bull, while Venus materializes in Young oriental woman by Juana Romani.

“In this way, Bustos’s project proposes a new visual grammar for the institution, reminding us that perspectives are never singular but always multiple. In doing so, it reveals the Museum as a space of freedom and invites us to open new layers of meaning and new ways of imagining it,” concludes Marchesi.