Roberto Valcárcel
(La Paz, Bolivia, 1951 – 2021): Visual artist, university professor, and lecturer. A pioneer who introduced visual alternatives and contemporary themes in Bolivian art in the last decades of the twentieth century. In his private workshops of creativity and art history, he developed his own critical discourse and he received audiences of diverse nature to reflect on art under original conceptual structures, far from the hierarchies established by Eurocentric and chronological traditions. Institutionally, he was a professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Arts of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés and director of the Arts Studies at the same university. In his personal work, language and questioning of the symbols and messages inscribed are aimed at problematizing issues of the art market, of the traditional figurative representation, and of the historical panorama of Bolivian art, among other varied themes. He also developed conceptual projects such as ‘Producciones Valcárcel’ (1978), a space devoted to collective artistic research, as well as the ‘Sociedad Interplanetaria de Artistas’ (‘Interplanetary Society of Artists’) (1984), the ‘Movimiento Erótico’ (‘Erotic Movement’) (1983), and the ‘Banco Nacional de Ideas’ (‘National Bank of Ideas’) (1992).
