Justo Pastor Mellado’s essay “Breve nota sobre pintura chilena: 1950–88,” introduced the traveling exhibition Cirugía Plástica [Plastic Surgery] to Berlin audiences. Mellado mentions certain specific features of the Chilean art produced during that period, which shed light on endemic problems that still exist today, such as the lack of state and private support for art, the absence of any local writing about art, the advertising and business world (which, one way or another, is related to the visual arts), and the connection between academia, political parties, and painting, among others. The author also questions the idea of a “Chilean avant-garde,” since in his argument he opts to focus on the works of Eugenio Dittborn and Gonzalo Díaz. In his opinion, the works produced by these artists illustrate a particular theme that manages to avoid that description. 

The exhibition Cirugía plástica / Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst [Plastic Surgery / A New Society for the Visual Arts] ran from September 14 to October 28, 1989, in Berlin. The exhibition included works that reflected the subjects and approaches addressed by contemporary Chilean art. The event therefore brought together, for the first time, works by more than twenty Chilean artists that showed the heterogeneity of the country’s art in terms of image, theme, and discourse. Several trends were on display there. Carlos Leppe, Gonzalo Díaz, Eugenio Dittborn, Lotty Rosenfeld, Virginia Errázuriz, and Francisco Brugnoli represented the various ideas being explored by the Escena de Avanzada. The exhibition also included works by young artists such as Bruna Truffa, Rodrigo Cabezas, Ciro Beltrán, and Mario Soro, among others. The critics and theorists Francisco Brugnoli, Justo Pastor Mellado, Gonzalo Muñoz, Pablo Oyarzún, and Nelly Richard contributed essays to the catalogue for this exhibition.

Justo Pastor Mellado (b. 1950) is an independent curator and art critic. He has held the position of director of the Escuela de Arte de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and the Escuela de Artes Visuales y Fotografía de la Universidad UNIACC. He has authored a number of texts, essays, and monographs, including the following books: La novela chilena del grabado [The Chilean Printmaking Novel] (1998), Textos estratégicos [Strategic Texts] (2001), Textos de batalla [Battle Texts] (2009), and Escritura Funcionaria [Functionary Writing] (2013).