Iván Argote (B. 1983)

The Bogotá-born, Paris-based artist Iván Argote uses film, photography and sculpture to interrogate how societal norms and political ideologies influence perceptions of the world. The comic yet critical All My Girlfriends — which appeared in the 2017 Saatchi Gallery exhibition From Selfie to Self-Expression — extend these concerns to issues of gender and sexual desire. It comprises thirty individually framed C-prints. Each shows the artist standing before a cosmetics advertisement in a pharmacy shop window. Argote himself interacts with these idealised visions of female beauty, through posing, touching, imitating, and in one case even kissing them. He thus reveals the artificiality of such rote displays of affection, while placing himself in the role of a voyeur, enacting male fantasies of romance and affection on a series of passive, unresponsive images. Combining weighty ideals with an engaging lightness, All My Girlfriends distils Argote’s investigation of power structures into an immediately approachable form.