La Chola Poblete
La Chola Poblete (b. 1989, Guaymallén, Mendoza, Argentina) paints large-scale watercolors, some over six feet tall, in which the Virgin Mary is fused with Pachamama, the Andean earth goddess: sacred, ceremonial figures rendered in a medium whose transparency and staining bleed give the images a fluid, unfixed quality that keeps received religious and racial iconography visibly in motion rather than settled into a single meaning.
Poblete studied art in Mendoza before moving to Buenos Aires, where an early period of poverty and rejection culminated in a formative crisis: encountering a reproduction of Velázquez's court dwarves, she felt that the European tradition she had trained in "didn't represent the real Argentina" or her own indigenous, Bolivian-descended family. Out of that crisis emerged La Chola, an alter ego who began as a performance persona and gradually became, in Poblete's own account, an inseparable part of her identity, one she continues to embody in performances with the drag collective Comparsa Drag.
Works
Projects
Gesture and Form
Selected Drawings from the 20th and 21st Century
12 June - 26 September 2025
Gesture and Form explores the act of mark-making as a means of expression, innovation, and experimentation across the 20th and 21st century.
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Essay · Allison Hayes and Thomas Clifton · August 7, 2025
Watercolor as Queer Method
La Chola Poblete and the Politics of the Stain
La Chola Poblete paints with water because water will not respect a border. In the monumental sheets that earned the Argentine artist a special mention at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Marian icons and Andean symbols dissolve into one another along the paper’s fibers, and the bleed itself becomes the argument. This essay reads Poblete’s watercolor practice as a queer method: a way of making images in which porous edges, staining, and evaporation carry the conceptual weight that hard contour once claimed. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification and Severo Sarduy’s neobaroque, it follows a medium long dismissed as minor into the center of contemporary drawing, and follows an artist who, in her own words, does not believe in healing.
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