Gerónimo Araquistain — Berlin 2026
Presented at POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair during Berlin Art Week
Gerónimo Araquistain will be in Berlin from September 6 to 14, 2026, presented by LUMBRE Gallery at POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair during Berlin Art Week.
Based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Araquistain works across painting, object-based pieces and textile surfaces made from reclaimed plush fabric and polyester fiber sourced from second-hand teddy bears.
Through this material process, objects associated with affection, childhood and consumption are transformed into symbolic surfaces that address popular iconography, playing cards, power structures and collective memory.
Selected works
Memory (2026)
100 x 62 cm.
Matter (2026)
100 x 62 cm.
Abundance (2025)
120 x 120 cm.
Pixel 1 (2025)
61 x 47 cm.
Pixel 2 (2025)
61 x 47 cm.
Pixel 3 (2025)
61 x 47 cm.
The Berlin presentation brings together works from Araquistain’s ongoing research into colonization, history and symbolic information embedded in everyday objects and mass-consumption imagery. His works reorganize familiar signs — playing cards, crowns, popular icons, brands and domestic visual codes — to reveal structures of power, desire and circulation that often remain naturalized or overlooked.
Made from fragments of second-hand teddy bears — pieces of plush skin, fabric and polyester fiber — the works transform affective objects into symbolic surfaces. Each material fragment carries a double history: the intimate memory of an object that passed through domestic and childhood environments, and the global history of industrial manufacturing, visible in labels that trace different years and places of production. In this way, the material becomes both surface and archive: a soft residue of affection, labor, circulation and global consumption.
Memory / Matter
Memory refers to an ancestral form of knowledge associated with the mountain, mineral time and the slow cycles of the earth. Matter condenses the physical dimension of territory: soil, body, resource, friction and dispute.
Together, the works explore how images carry historical forces and how color can reactivate inherited symbols, bringing them into a contemporary and unstable present.
Pixel as matter
The Pixel works approach the pixel as a basic unit of contemporary perception: the atom of the screen era. In digital culture, images are built from units of light, color and information. Araquistain translates that logic into a tactile surface made from fragments of second-hand teddy bears, replacing the immaterial glow of the screen with the physical density of plush fabric.
This displacement creates a tension between digital color and material color, between light and fiber, between image and object. What appears at first as a pixelated field becomes, on closer view, a surface of recovered skins, textures and residues. The pixel is no longer only a unit of visual information; it becomes a fragment of matter, charged with affective, industrial and symbolic histories.
Abundance
Abundance brings together the head of a king from the Spanish playing card deck with ornamental elements drawn from different tarot cards. The image belongs to Araquistain’s ongoing Saga de los naipes, a series that approaches the Spanish deck as an everyday symbolic system shaped by colonial history.
In the work, ornament is not treated as decoration alone. Flowers, crowns, vegetal forms and tarot-derived motifs accumulate around the figure of power, producing an ambiguous form of abundance. This abundance refers not only to prosperity or growth, but also to the excess of inherited signs that continue to circulate through popular images, games, rituals and domestic visual culture.
Made from reclaimed plush fabric and polyester fiber sourced from second-hand teddy bears, the work adds another layer to this symbolic structure. A visual language associated with authority, conquest and historical transmission is reconstructed through fragments of affective, mass-produced objects. The result is a soft and seductive surface where power, memory, ornament and consumption coexist.
About the artist
Gerónimo Araquistain was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1985. He studied painting with Marino Santa María and attended the Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA). He also holds a degree in Business Administration from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA, 2013).
He has held solo exhibitions at Centro Cultural San Martín, Buenos Aires, and Centro Municipal de Arte de Avellaneda. His work has been selected for the 112th Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales del Palais de Glace, the Bienal de Artes Visuales Áreatec, Premio B·Arte, Premio Universidad de Belgrano, Salón de Arte Textil del Museo Sívori, Premio MACSur and Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales at MUMBAT.
Contact
Gerónimo Araquistain
Buenos Aires, Argentina
www.araquistain.art
@geroaraquistain
geronimo@araquistain.art