Natalia Bruno, Lucia E. Lopez, Katerina Atamañuk
Curator: Catalina Bagnato Irigoyen
November 15 – December 15, 2025
Opening: Saturday, November 15, 7 PM
Cassia House presents Of Fabulous Chimeras and the Monsters We Invent, a group exhibition curated by Catalina Bagnato Irigoyen, featuring works by Natalia Bruno, Katerina Atamañuk and Lucía E. López.
.png)
The exhibition offers a symbolic journey through the myths of origin and the creatures that inhabit our collective imagination. Through painting, sculpture, and installation, the artists explore the body, animality, and transformation as territories where the human is redefined—a realm of hybridity, where beauty and monstrosity converge.
Drawing on the thought of René Girard, the curatorship reflects on the role of sacrifice and difference in the construction of myth. Chimeras, bull-headed gods, and beings that oscillate between the real and the fabulous appear as metaphors for what we choose to exclude in order to name ourselves. The exhibition does not seek to tame the beast, but to recognize it as an essential part of our symbolic memory.
To return to the origin of the fable is to relive the moment when we decided to construct the myth (and the world). The moment when we invented ourselves as someone and claimed a name within the universe.
René Girard found in our most primitive rituals the explanation of how beasts became a fundamental part of our history. That “other,” sanctified through sacrifice, allowed us to construct a fable: the order of the human world as the inevitable offspring of the sacrifice of all difference.
Our chimeras—our most profane beasts—are nothing but the names we give to what we wish to distance ourselves from, and which, nevertheless, remains intimately bound to all our origin myths.
The bull sacrificed to the god whose name we chose, transformed into god and saint at the moment of sacrifice, becomes the symbol of a humanity both projected and denied in the animal other. And suddenly, the god has the head of a bull. And suddenly, the chimera. And suddenly, humanity traced freehand with the burning charcoal of the sacrificial pyre.
What is the human, if not the chimera of its own fables? A puzzle of everything it chose to embody, of everything it chose to leave outside. Gods with bull heads, headless humans, and everything that lies in between.
- Catalina Bagnato Irigoyen
Of Fabulous Chimeras and the Monsters We Invent invites us to revisit our own mythologies—the ones still pulsing beneath the surface of the present. In a time that multiplies its masks and fictions, the works gathered at Cassia House return to us the ancestral gesture of imagining again and again what it means to be human.
