Curated: Catalina Bagnato Irigoyen
August 8 – September 8, 2026
Opening: Saturday, August 8, 7 PM
Cassia House presents Forced Autopsy, a solo exhibition by Romina Juárez, curated by Catalina Bagnato Irigoyen, which approaches the gallery as a body to be intervened upon, opened up, and brought back to life.
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The exhibition proposes a complete occupation of Cassia House. Romina Juárez intervenes upon the gallery’s glass façade, floor, walls, ceiling, and upper level, transforming its architecture into a physical extension of her work. The exhibition begins on the street and advances into every corner of the space.
Many art institutions are drawn to a quasi-sacramental secrecy that strives to uphold the tradition of museums as mausoleums: only a select and initiated public is allowed access to an art that remains static and immaculate—a notion as pretentious and elitist as the opening of this text. What is the best way to destroy this obscurantism? Romina Juárez proposes vandalizing it.
We need to bring laughter back into these spaces. There was a time when Buenos Aires galleries were truly alive, with exhibitions such as Arte Destructivo and the happenings of the 1960s. We believe it is essential to recover that ironic, playful, and combative spirit as a form of artistic creation and institutional dialogue.
On this occasion, Romina Juárez took over and vandalized this white cube to her heart’s content, in a gesture that ultimately releases it from every burden. We need to break with that ideal in order to make it a real place again, a space that is alive. The artist conquers the gallery’s skeleton, turning it into an artwork and transforming it into part of her creative universe: Romina observes and appropriates forms and bodies. She performs a forced autopsy on dead spaces and ailing bodies, reviving or resignifying them through her gaze.
Her work is not committed to beauty, but to truth and to a search for ways of representing the deepest and most intimate emotions. She depicts contorted bodies that distress her through an aggressive yet playful brushstroke, giving them the possibility of becoming something more. In this way, her scalpel-brush also brings the gallery back to life by devouring its body and transforming it into a reminder that, sometimes, we need to break ourselves open to bring out the best of what lies within.
- Catalina Bagnato Irigoyen
The works brought together in the exhibition present vulnerable, distorted, tense, and exposed bodies. Through acrylic, crayon, and collage, Juárez constructs images shaped by humor, anguish, and a gestural violence that makes no attempt to correct or beautify what it represents.
In Forced Autopsy, this process expands from the artworks into the architecture itself. The white cube ceases to function as a neutral backdrop and becomes material: an institutional body opened, invaded, and placed beneath the artist’s scalpel-brush.
Taken as a whole, the exhibition proposes a gallery under occupation, where solemnity is replaced by play and vandalism becomes a form of care. An autopsy performed not to certify a death, but to discover what might still begin to beat again.
