Knöpfe (El subconsciente por sobre la razón) | Magdalena Isaacson Labarthe

About the author

Visual weaves and cellular poems vibrate in Magdalena Isaacson’s books objects. In each one of them, as an organ of a literary body, there’s a language that opens multiple visions both beautiful and sinister. From an intense graphic DNA, she gives life and a personality to visceral meditations of a sequence that seems to be the expression of private diaries displayed with comfort and courage.    

Magdalena´work is the sum of many creative gestures and tireless processes, as it is the accumulation and categorization of two and threedimensional objects, added to drawings and graphic expressions that give her work a forceful richness. In design school, she focused her ability and passion for composition and its infinite solutions, and in gestural theatre, she found a complement in the idea of a design that is alive: “Because everything goes through the body, its emotions and reflections… in the theatre, everything is art and exposes you fully”. So, from the stage her creative language expanded, objects became alive and the reflection between textures was more revealing than ever.

In 2009, Magdalena received an invitation to participate in the surrealistic movement El Umbral Secreto (Secret Threshold), a platform that opened different spaces where to show her jewellery or wearable ready-made pieces, both in Chile and other countries. She added the book to her work, as a resource and also content. In 2011 the book of shreds, the terminally ill book, became a new raw material with which she works with unrestrictedly until today.

She has created more than 10 pieces that travel through almost thirteen years and different development processes. Nowadays, with Velcro Ediciones, she takes all her resources (objects-poetry-graphics-spaces) and combines them with documentary work, in a quest to widen her visual tale to an even more acute language, connected and aware of the social contingency.  

Magdalena Isaacson’s work grows and mutates constantly, as a being of its own, detached from structures and captivity, silent and captivating.