Claudia Fontes is an artist based in England, born and raised in Argentina, and working internationally.

She studied arts at the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón in Buenos Aires and Art History at Buenos Aires University. She was awarded grants to develop her practice at Taller de Barracas in Buenos Aires and to be a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where she worked under the advice of Richard Deacon, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Joan Jonas, amongst others.

She has been showing her work since 1992. One of the winners of the Parque de la Memoria Award in 1999, her piece Reconstruction of the Portrait of Pablo Miguez, is one of the most iconic artworks addressing the last dictatorship’s period in Argentina’s history.  In 2022 she received a life-time achievement award from the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes, and a Konex Award for Visual Arts, both in Argentina.

Also in 2022, the interdisciplinary collective she founded, La Intermundial Holobiente, was one of the lumbungs at documenta fifteen with the project The Book of the Ten Thousand Things, to be published by Steidl in the near future. She had already participated in Documenta 13 as part of The Wordly House in 2012. In 2017, she represented Argentina at the 57th Venice Biennale with her installation The Horse Problem. In 2018 she was one of seven artists-curators at the 33rd Sao Paulo Biennial for which she created the section The Slow Bird. In 2020 she was nominated for the High Line Plinth, and was one of four finalists for the Percent for Arts NYC‘s commission at Bush Terminal in Brooklyn.

In parallel to her personal practice, she has spearheaded the creation of several collective projects and has generated spaces for the development of critical thought, particularly in relation to artist-led culture. Amongst them TRAMA. (2000-2006), The Creature in Between (2016), and more recently La Intermundial Holobiente (2020-ongoing), a collective platform for playful artistic cross-disciplinary research together with philosopher Paula Fleisner and writer Pablo Martín Ruiz.

Her works can be found in the collections of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, MALBA (Museum for Latin American Art of Buenos Aires), MAMBA (Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires), and MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art Rosario). Her work is also part of private collections in Latin America, the United States, Europe and Australia.

Upcoming opportunities to see her work are a solo show at Instituto de Visión, NYC (September 2023) and a solo show at Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, Spain (February 2024).

On this website you will find a selection of her artistic projects, focusing on those more relevant to her current interests.