Valentina Quintero debuts at the Museum of Modern Art with "A Day in the Life."

Valentina Quintero , from Mendoza, 27 years old, artist and performer from the Valeries Factory gallery , is the new darling of young Argentine art . Her career is counted in months, from when the director of the Museum of Modern Art , Victoria Noorthoorn, laid eyes on one of her works exhibited at the last edition of arteBA until today , when she has just opened her first exhibition at that same museum, A Day in the Life .

Everything hanging on the first floor of the San Telmo building is less than a year old . Raúl Flores, in charge of the museum's federal vision, was in charge of contacting the artist. Once in her studio, it was a matter of a chat before the museum director was summoned, and they began planning the exhibition in record time.

Quintero worked so quickly on the works in the exhibition that the curator decided to include the dates he started and finished each painting on the cards—the small posters that accompany the works.

In the collection of works on display, the artist translates her experiences in performance, nightlife, and the emotional and militant environments she navigates into pictorial media . Hanging at the Moderno are large-scale drawings on black paper reminiscent of muralism; as well as medium-sized square pieces reminiscent of comics.

At the same time, in each micro-scene he conceives, brushstrokes emerge that find their references in the impressionism of Paul Gauguin and the expressionism of Edvard Munch.

"I needed to explore large formats for these drawings. It was also a way of recognizing that drawing can be translated into large formats, and that this meticulousness and delicate treatment can also be captured with the strength and power found in other types of work," the artist explained.

Quintero paints with pastels, chalk, and oil pastels. She combines intense contrasts and a constantly vibrating choreographic narrative. Her technique is paired with dance, the discipline that led her from performance —she dazzled in the best Almodovarian muse style at ARCOmadrid at the reception held for the collector Dominica Munro at her residence in the La Moraleja neighborhood—to paper.

“Thinking about those movements in that automatic way, as the drawing unfolds, for me has a lot to do with the way dance is improvised and on stage with the body, keeping it in mind,” he reflected during the press tour.

The earliest works on display focus on the treatment of the body, anatomy, and the way these figures connect. The most recent, created during the summer, are based on scenes Quintero collects in his mind about, he explained, "the human relationships that surround me, the groups I create, queer life, nightlife, and also daylife in relation to those loves and friendships, and all the ways we act collectively."

Quintero bursts onto the Buenos Aires art scene as an artist who not only produces tangible work, but whose mere presence generates an aesthetic event . The theatricality that surrounds her, her sense of novelty and performance, fit perfectly with the Moderno's 2025 program, anchored in theater and how it has been linked to art throughout history.

Valentina Quintero. A Day in the Life , at the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art (San Juan 350), Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. until June 30.