Diana Dowek, Untitled, from the series Pinturas de la insurrección (Paintings
of the Insurrection), 1973. © the artist. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

Painting in Defense of Life

Last April at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, Argentine artist and activist Diana Dowek presented her first solo exhibition in the United States, Uprising in the Mirror. The show featured over twenty paintings made between 1967 and 1982, a period of mass state-sanctioned violence wrought by Argentina’s American-backed military dictatorship, which disappeared, tortured, and slaughtered over 30,000 people, as well as the Cold War.

Dowek is known for her symbolic and cinematic acrylic paintings, and these works, made during a time of heavy political repression and censorship, not only depict scenes of violence and oppression but also resistance and what Chilean art critic Nelly Richard calls the “presence of the memory of absence.” Throughout Dowek’s paintings, everyday scenes are subtly imbued with metaphorical symbols such as wire fences, the fragmented or absent body, and mirrors, silently framing the violence and cruelty of the dictatorship, which was too dangerous to explicitly name at the time, with each brushstroke.

In Paisaje I (Landscape I), 1975, we’re dropped in the middle of a highway that cuts through the Argentine pampas, low grassland plains native to the region. A brooding tension fills the landscape: a looming storm clouds the scene, the lush grass becomes indiscernible in the somber sky, and in the distance, the road ahead seems undeterminable. At the bottom right of the painting, a car’s side mirror looks back at the edge where the road and the grass meet behind us. When we take a closer look, a body lying face down on the cement appears. Wearing all black, parallel to the road, the person is almost easy to miss as they camouflage with the pavement amongst the immensity of the pampas. Even if we look away, the horrors of the past continue to haunt us, and the eeriness lingers. What might the road forward bring?

Diana Dowek, Paisaje I (Landscape I), 1975. © the artist. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

Throughout history, the pampas have been conjured to shape social imaginaries. In the early colonial days of the 16th century, Spanish conquistadors would refer to the fertile pampas as an empty desert, manufacturing consent for the genocide of Indigenous populations of the region and establishing a new social hierarchy that privileged the white colonizer as the development of cities along the Río de la Plata was deemed “progress” and “civilization.” During the 19th century, landscape paintings attempted to reclaim the pampas in order to help establish a sense of national identity post-independence, creating the idea of a gaucho, an Argentine cowboy, as the newly formed nation incentivized European settlers to immigrate to Argentina by offering plots of land in the pampas called estancias in hopes of whitening the country for the sake of “advancing the nation.” The history of the pampas, and the Black and Indigenous populations that inhabited them and continue to exist there, has gone through a continuous fragmentation and erasure. Only fifty years ago, under the command of Jorge Rafael Videla, the military dictatorship disposed of the kidnapped political dissidents, anyone found to be a communist or leftist activist, through death flights: bodies were dropped from airplanes to rot in the vast plains, the South Atlantic Ocean, or the Río de la Plata.

The violent histories of the dictatorship are silently embedded within Dowek’s paintings, and they unfold as we examine them more closely. In her later works, Dowek introduces wire fences, wrapping around everyday scenes and objects of Argentine life. In Paisaje cotidiano (Serie III) (Everyday Landscape [Series III]), 1977, a hole cut in a fence opens up to patches of flattened, brown grass, sunken amid the rest of the verdant pampas. Scorched from the weight of a body or two that were once there, the silhouettes subtly mark the presence of an absence. Although the bodies are gone from our sight, we can devise an idea of what might have gone down at the scene.

Installation view of Diana Dowek: Uprising in the Mirror, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA),
New York, 2025. Photo: George Etheredge

Eventually, everyday objects become more and more enveloped in the wire fencing, suffocating or left with no room to escape. Paisaje argentino II (Argentine Landscape II), 1981–82, depicts another wire fence, this time overlaid on an abstracted, nude background resembling skin. In the struggle to break free, deep purples and pale yellows bruise together and cut, jagged wire breaks skin, and yet the background remains ambiguous enough to resemble a barren landscape. The tension between the wire fence and the reference to the body, in its fragmented form, produces both an unsettling reveal of cruelty and hope for a way out. In her self-portrait Autorretrato, 1982, Dowek stares into a mirror encased in a web of fencing, only to barely find a trace of a ghastly reflection.

Diana Dowek, Autorretrato (Self-Portrait), 1982. © the artist. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

Dowek, who has described art as a battlefield and painting as her weapon, gives life to death as she reopens the poorly sutured wounds of history to show us that the past is not static but is rather carried into our present and future through memory’s constant reinterpretations. The presence of absence throughout her work helps make sure that the memory of the disappeared is kept alive and not forgotten. To forget, to make the disappeared disappear once again, even if just in our memory, would be a kind of double death.

Following the trajectory of Chile’s transition to democracy after Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1989, Nelly Richard’s book Cultural Residues explains how in the aftermath of the dictatorship, an administrative consensus was predetermined by governing agencies and officials, removing from the collective history any memories too painful to bear for the sake of “progress,” reducing martyrs to numbers and abducted loved ones to statistics. In an attempt to disconnect the present from the painful, recent past, the consensus society becomes sterile, “only capable of referring to memory but not of practicing memory nor expressing its torments,” Richard says. Memory then becomes a vacant word, empty of meanings and emotions, hollowed out and neutralized for the sake of returning to “normality” and creating a new status quo.

But paintings like Dowek’s offer an opening to interrogate the narratives regurgitated by desensitized official histories, helping us to truly practice memory, which requires us to face our grief. In an essay entitled "If We Go, We Go On Fire,” an anonymous comrade proposes grief as a framework, which helps catalyze us into action. They share that:

“...as we lean into grief, our willingness to question the necessity of this present reality shifts, our fears shift and with them so too can our priorities. The more deeply we are willing to embody the grief we experience, the deeper we question the structures around us, the more our fears shift away from acute-self-preservation and towards the existential, and the more willing we can become to actually live in accordance with the worlds we claim to desire. We become willing to risk because we recognize that we have already lost so much, that we are actively losing more and more of ourselves every day this world of death goes on existing.”

Grief has no respect for time; it has the ability to bring us back to the moment when we last spoke to our loved ones like it was yesterday. Fully embodying our grief then plunges us into clearly seeing how the consensus actively wishes to sanitize our pain in its attempt to preserve the status quo; grief snaps us back into our reality, making sure that society doesn’t produce a blanket amnesia over recent history.

Painting helps us practice an active memory of our grief; it makes us realize what is truly important and  ultimately gives meaning to our lives versus what keeps us paralyzed in the machine. In an interview from 2023 with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Argentina, Dowek states, “Art is [her] way of life. It’s to uncover reality to truly show the sufferings of human beings, of men, of women, of children, of the most dispossessed, what’s not really seen.” Paintings like Dowek’s have the gift of making us see the invisible and pushing us forward to fight for our right to life and our right to memory.