BLACK GALLERY
Pueblo Garzón | Uruguay
Directors | Mercedes Sader & Patricia Fernández Graña
Black Gallery was founded and directed by Mercedes Sader and Patricia Fernández Graña in 2014, in Uruguay. It promotes innovation in curatorial practices through its exhibition program. It maintains the commitment to preserve the legacy of historical figures and encourage the practice of emerging and established artists, fulfilling its mission to participate in the art world in an active and influential way.
Mercedes Sader y Pati Fernández
ESTE ARTE 2026 | FRANCISCA MAYA
Conceived exclusively for ESTE ARTE, Black Gallery presents The Dance of the Circle, a solo project by Francisca Maya. The artist extends the legacy of Uruguayan geometric abstraction into the present, with the circle as the core of a visual choreography that intertwines form, color, and space. Her practice unfolds between painting, object, and sculpture: spheres, pyramids, and cubes that cast shadows and imagine impossible landscapes; light boxes hovering between the pictorial and the three-dimensional; works on canvas and wood that shift with each viewpoint. Rather than static forms, these pieces invite movement—asking the viewer to inhabit a space in constant flux, where geometry becomes a sensorial experience, playful expansion, and perpetual transformation.
ESTE ARTE 2025 | María Maggiori
María Maggiori
BIO
María Maggiori (Buenos Aires, 1975) studied art in Paris, France, at the University of La Sorbonne, Paris VIII, and at the École de Sévrès. She then continued her studies at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School. She attended workshops and seminars by various artists and the drawing practices of Eduardo Stupía at the Torcuato Di Tella University, she was part of the PAC and Yungas contemporary art programs coordinated by Raúl Flores. She participated in National and International Drawing Salons, won a scholarship from the National Fund for the Arts, and his work has been exhibited at the Cultural Center of Spain in Montevideo, at Bienalsur, and the Engraving Biennial in Osaka, Japan, among others. She currently lives and works in Uruguay.
STATEMENT
For me, drawing is thought in movement. It is my form of knowledge, which moves from one surface to the other. They are all forms of the same adventure where sometimes one stops one’s gaze on a nearby shore, and one listens to the distant vibration of memory, or one finds deep words of those that leave a mark and at the precise moment when one believes one has reached some point. Place, everything changes again and is transformed. The drawing comes from the most urgent need to transit and inhabit space and time, enveloping us in an infinite labyrinth that loses all types of certainties at every step and plunges us into the mysterious forms that border between reality and fiction.
ESTE FOCUS
Francisca Maya, Artist
Meram Saá, Artist
María Maggiori, Artist
In conversation with Mercedes Sader and Patricia Fernández Graña, co-directors, of Black Gallery.
Sunday, January 5, 2025
8:50 PM 9:30 PM
Pavilion Vik
ESTE ARTE 2024
ESTE ARTE 2023
José Pedro Costigliolo (1902-1985, Uruguay) | María Freire (1917-2015, Uruguay) | María Maggiori (1975, Argentina) | Meram Sáa (1963, Argentina) |Pati Fernández Graña (1968, Uruguay)
ESTE ARTE 2022
Bandi Binder (1917-2006, Hungary) | Ciro Jaumandreu (1977, Uruguay) | Francisca Maya (1980, Uruguay) | Heidi Lender (1966, USA) | Hugo Longa (1934-1990, Uruguay) | José Risso (1970, Uruguay) | María Freire (1917-2015, Uruguay) | María Maggiori (1975, Argentina) | Pati Fernández Graña (1968, Uruguay) | Rómulo Macció (1931-2016, Argentina) | Susette Kok (1967, Holland)
ESTE JOURNAL 2021
Federico Ruiz Santesteban (1980, Uruguay) | María Freire (1917-2015, Uruguay) | Meram Sáa (1963, Argentina) | Pati Fernández Graña (1968, Uruguay)
ESTE ARTE 2020
Antonio Berni (1905-1981, Argentina) | Bandi Binder (1917-2006, Hungary) | Cathy Burghi (1980, Uruguay) | Julia Castagno (1977, Uruguay) | Pati Fernández Graña (1968, Uruguay) | María Freire (1917-2015, Uruguay) | Heidi Lender (1966, USA) | Hugo Longa (1934-1990, Uruguay) | José Risso (1970, Uruguay)
ESTE ARTE 2019
Bandi Binder (1917-2006, Hungary) | Julia Castagno (1977, Uruguay) | José Pedro Costigliolo (1902-1985, Uruguay) | Pati Fernández (1968, Uruguay) | María Freire (1917-2015, Uruguay) | Pablo Uribe (1962, Uruguay) | Heidi Lender (1966, USA)
ESTE ARTE 2018
Bandi Binder (1917-2006, Hungary) | Julia Castagno (1977, Uruguay) | Pati Fernández (1968, Uruguay) | María Freire (1917-2015, Uruguay)
