ana segovia: the office of inter-american affairs presents — Ana Segovia

The Office of Inter-American Affairs Presents is Ana Segovia’s first solo exhibition at kurimanzutto New York. Bringing together a new body of work alongside archival film, sound, and video, the exhibition takes the gaucho—one of the Southern Cone’s most enduring cultural archetypes—as its point of departure for examining how national and gender identities are constructed through visual culture and collective imaginaries. Throughout the exhibition, paintings, moving images, and sound are experienced in dialogue, each reframing the others. Visitors discover large-scale paintings that isolate details associated with the gaucho: a hat, a poncho, a belt, wide-legged trousers, a leather canteen, sheep and cattle, and hands holding a mate. Cropped like cinematic close-ups, the paintings magnify these fragments, withholding a complete image. Their vivid palette heightens their sense of artifice, reinforcing the exhibition’s exploration of how representations have shaped the image of the gaucho. Together, these fragments expose the visual conventions that have sustained this figure across generations.

Cinema serves as both the exhibition's historical point of departure and one of its defining formal strategies. As visitors move through the gallery, archival film, sound, and painting gradually come into focus in shifting sequences of encounters that unfold like cinematic montage. Two monitors screen archival films produced by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), depicting the broader Southern Cone, including Uruguay and Chile. Segovia first encountered these materials while developing his early 2026 exhibition at Fundación Cervieri Monsuárez in Montevideo, Uruguay, curated by Magalí Arriola. Accompanying the films is an audio recording from the OCIAA archives that extends these historical materials throughout the gallery, immersing visitors in an atmosphere that recalls a film screening.

Established by the United States government in 1940 as part of the Good Neighbor Policy, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) sought, under Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, to strengthen relations with Latin America through cultural exchange while simultaneously consolidating U.S. influence across the continent. Through exhibitions, radio broadcasts, publications, and films, the agency promoted the widespread circulation of images of the region, playing a key role in shaping perceptions that continue to inform ideas of Latin America today. Segovia returns to these documentaries, transforming their imagery into paintings that examine the mechanisms by which cinema produces and circulates cultural archetypes. He focuses in particular on the figure of the gaucho, which, like the American cowboy, came to embody the rural hero, the solitary horseman, and an idealized form of masculinity. Rooted in colonial histories and later reinforced by cinema and popular culture, both figures became enduring national myths.

Segovia's examination of this archetype continues in Gambola (Uruguay), a large-scale video documenting a performance created in collaboration with Uruguayan performers, in which he explores how the gaucho’s body is constructed through representation and framing. The camera deliberately restricts the visual field, focusing exclusively on the dancers' legs and feet, dressed in the wide trousers associated with gaucho attire, while the rest of the body remains outside the frame. Conceived around the cinematic device of cropping, the work extends a strategy that also runs throughout Segovia's paintings, translating cinematic devices—the long shot, the American shot, and the close-up—into painting and using fragmentation to shape meaning. What remains outside the frame becomes just as significant as what is shown, foregrounding the act of framing itself and opening a space in which the viewer's imagination completes what the image chooses to omit.

Near Gambola (Uruguay), a series of ten charcoal drawings on paper functions as storyboards for the video. Installed on a wall painted the same color as the exposed sheetrock on the reverse of the video’s wooden structure, they suggest a glimpse behind the scenes of the moving image. In doing so, they make visible the exhibition’s own structural system and reinforce the gallery as a space where the construction of images is continuously exposed.

Segovia also turns to the landscape surrounding the gaucho. Two vertical compositions in the exhibition depict the mountainous landscapes of Chilean Patagonia in pastel shades of pink, green, blue, and orange that, rather than emphasizing realism, evoke the sensory experience of the territory. The paintings' palette recalls Uruguayan planismo, particularly the work of Petrona Viera, which served as an important source of inspiration for Segovia. Artists associated with this movement during the first half of the 20th century depicted everyday scenes and local landscapes through a palette of vivid, luminous colors. Segovia creates a new tension by revisiting images of the Southern Cone produced in the United States and reinterpreting them from a local perspective. Drawing on the painterly language of planismo, he transforms an externally constructed vision of the region through a tradition rooted in its own artistic history.

As visitors move between painting, cinema, archival materials, sound, and display, the exhibition itself enacts the processes it examines, exposing the mechanisms by which cultural images are framed, assembled, and circulated. In doing so, The Office of Inter-American Affairs Presents ultimately reveals the constructed nature of what is often perceived as fixed. By bringing the staging, artifice, and performativity underlying gender identities and national imaginaries into view, Segovia examines how images shape cultural myths and participate in the ongoing formation of collective identities.