Cecilia Vicuña joins Lehmann Maupin

Cecilia Vicuña joins Lehmann Maupin

Overlooked female artists continue to get their late moment in the sun. In her 70th year, Chile-born multi-disciplinary artist Cecilia Vicuña has been taken on by Lehmann Maupin gallery, which plans its first show of the artist in New York from May 19. A joint project is also planned for the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston this spring and autumn.

Now based in New York, Vicuña came back to art-world attention in last summer’s edition of the five-yearly contemporary art show Documenta, particularly for her so-called “quipu” works. These use unspun wool to emulate the pre-Columbian system of communication using knots.

Anna Stothart, director at Lehmann Maupin, says Vicuña’s use of materials, as well as a practice featuring poetry and performance, made the artist “an outlier from her contemporaries”.