Is Amalia Amoedo Latin America's Peggy Guggenheim?
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There are no air kisses for Amalia Amoedo, though she may look the type—blonde, beautiful, and dressed nearly completely in leopard print, down to the tips of her French manicure. When I meet her for a drink last spring in Venice, she rises for a full-on hug and a kiss on the cheek, though I have met the Buenos Aires–based art collector and philanthropist only briefly before.
Amoedo—Ama to her friends—knows Venice well, she tells me as she lights another of her tiny, thin cigarettes and looks out over the Grand Canal from the outside bar at the Londra Palace, where she is staying. Amoedo, 48, came here regularly with her late grandmother, the businesswoman (head of Argentina’s largest supplier of cement and concrete) and art lover Amalia “Amalita” Lacroze de Fortabat, who was so well known in Venice, Amoedo recalls, that “the band at Caffè Florian would play an Argentine tango when Amalita came in.”
We’re both in Venice for the opening festivities of the Biennale. She has attended previously, but 2024 is special. Adriano Pedrosa, from Brazil, is the first Latin American to organize the most prestigious art event on the planet. About one third of the 331 artists he selected for the Biennale were born in Latin America––nearly triple the representation in each of the last two iterations, with special attention paid to historical artists who never got their due. Pedrosa’s chosen theme, “Foreigners Everywhere,” picks up ideas of immigration, outsiderness, and historicity that have long been preoccupations of the Latin American artists that Amoedo has spent decades championing.
While his Biennale was still in the planning stages, Pedrosa visited Buenos Aires to peruse Amoedo’s personal collection of more than 650 artworks, ultimately choosing to borrow Maternidad, an abstract geometric painting by Elda Cerrato, an Italian-born Argentine who died in 2023 at 92 and whose work had never been presented in Venice. Amoedo bought the work in 2019, and now it had a pride of place—in its concrete and glass frame by the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi—amid artworks Pedrosa had chosen from all over the world.
Verónica Flom heads the Fundación Ama Amoedo, which Amoedo founded in 2021 to elevate the collecting, lending, and philanthropy she’s been doing on behalf of Latin American art and artists for more than two decades. Flom says Cerrato is one of a half dozen Argentine artists many Biennale visitors seemed to be discovering for the first time but who have been in Amoedo’s collection for years. That group also includes Mariana Tellería, Juan Del Prete, Líbero Badíi, Claudia Alarcón, and La Chola Poblete, whose work at the Biennale received a special mention. “What Amalia, through the foundation and the collecting, is trying to do is not just support the artists,” Flom says, “but the entire ecosystem for Latin American art.”
A few nights later, Amoedo is cruising the canals with a literal boatload of compatriots—including Flom, Laura Hakel (the curator in charge of Amoedo’s collection), a few friends, and fellow collectors—to a gallery opening that Amoedo financially supported for Luciana Lamothe, the artist representing Argentina at its solo pavilion at the Biennale, which Amoedo has also supported in the past. While there were many collectors and patrons involved, of course, the Biennale still felt like a major moment for Amoedo. She had gotten so much from being surrounded by art that, she says, “I thought it was a good idea to give something back to the artists.”
According to her New York Times obituary, Amoedo’s grandmother Amalia de Fortabat was a renowned beauty who, as the widow of a much older tycoon, grew the business and expanded into other industries, becoming Argentina’s richest woman before her death at 90 in 2012. Amoedo, her youngest granddaughter, joined de Fortabat on travels that often centered on art—to Venice, but also to Paris, and an annual stay at de Fortabat’s 14-room New York duplex pied-à-terre at the Pierre Hotel. Those visits exposed Amoedo to work that was then avant-garde. “I remember seeing Nam June Paik with her at the Guggenheim,” she tells me. I ask if she remembers noticing the absence of Argentine art. She does, she says, “but I knew someday everyone was going to get it.”
The work de Fortabat bought during her long life forms the foundation of the Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat Art Collection, the Buenos Aires museum she commissioned the award-winning Uruguay-born, New York-based architect Rafael Viñoly to build in her name. “The great question, when it opened in 2008, was ‘What does Amalita have?’ ” a museum staffer told me on a 2022 visit to the museum, before I met Amoedo for the first time. What Amalita had, it turned out, was vast, and international: Argentine masters like Antonio Berni, who drew a pastel drawing of Amoedo as a toddler as a gift to her grandmother; one of Andy Warhol’s portraits of Amalita; European masters, including two works by Jan and Pieter Brueghel; and Juliet and her Nurse by J.M.W. Turner (1836), for which Amalita set a headline-making price record when she purchased it at auction for $6.4 million in 1980. Today Amoedo is on the museum’s board and has fostered in the last 15 years more than 50 exhibitions of Argentinian art at the museum named for her grandmother.
Amoedo inherited her grandmother’s grand home in the leafy town of San Isidro, on Buenos Aires’s northern edge. “My grandmother always told me she knew I would fill the house with love and interesting people,” Amoedo says, continuing the tradition of family barbecues and parties Amoedo remembers from her youth. She modernized it as her own main residence and, later, that of her two daughters, renovating it for life in the 21st century. Art abounds, a combination of works Amoedo has bought and ones belonging to her grandmother that she is stewarding for the next generation.
At the entry is a painting of a heart by the Argentine artist Delia Cancela. There’s a Tracey Emin installation. The ceiling of the family room was specially modified to house a 13-by-25-foot abstract oil on canvas made by Paola Vega in 2018. I gasp at the beauty and scale of the Odilon Redon once owned by her grandmother: five canvas-covered screen panels painted in 1902 that nearly cover a dining room wall. A piece by sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas stands in the interior courtyard.
In the family room there is a staircase down to a basement store-room, so Amoedo can easily browse works that don’t fit upstairs. She long considered it her favorite space on the property—until this past autumn, when she added more space by converting what had been a tennis court in her grandmother’s day into an additional 1,400 square feet optimized for both art conservation and easy access. Amoedo likes to wander in there and admire her collection.
By the end of 2024 Amoedo was slated to receive three awards in Argentina and Uruguay for her work. At perhaps the most meaningful of these ceremonies, in which the governing body of Buenos Aires itself would be honoring her for her contributions to the region's culture, the esteemed Argentine artist Marcelo Pombo was one of several paying tribute to her. Amoedo, he says, doesn’t collect art but rather artists themselves. Indeed, Amoedo loves Pombo and his work so much she has a tattoo of one of his drawings, “an artwork on my skin,” as she puts it.
One day in Buenos Aires, Flom takes me to artist Marta Minujín's studio. Born in 1943, Minujín is one of the most prominent Latin American pop and conceptual artists. Amoedo was a teenager when she first met her, at a tango party with her grandmother. (“Can you imagine?” Amoedo asks with a laugh.)
Minujín represented Argentina at the Venice Biennale in 1986, but her first survey show in the U.S. wasn’t until 2023; Amoedo was among the backers of that acclaimed exhibition, which was presented at New York’s Jewish Museum. Now Amoedo is supporting the first major European exhibition of Minujín’s work, a new show covering more than six decades of the artist’s happenings, performances, installations, and video works. The show is on view at Copenhagen Contemporary (through April 21), and then it travels to the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid and the Tate Liverpool. Minujín has jokingly played on her patron’s nickname, calling her “AmaMaravilla,” basically Wonder Woman, in recognition of everything Amoedo—who has championed Argentine artists through decades of the country’s political and economic volatility—does for artists.
Amoedo loves to buy art from artists’ first shows, before fame or fortune finds the creators, when support is most needed. And though some of the artworks she purchased early have increased in value, she’s focused on stewardship rather than speculation; she is proud that she has never sold a work from her collection. The way she measures success is by seeing that “artists have the life they want and can live off their work.” But for that to happen, she adds, “we need to give artists time and care.”
Her grandmother took pride in bringing the best of European and British art to Argentina. In contrast, Amoedo’s collecting focuses almost solely on artists from closer to home, at least culturally: Argentinian art from the 20th and 21st centuries and, more broadly, contemporary Latin American art that explores themes connecting artists across countries.
“There are many geographies, subcultures, and varied art practices in Latin America,” Laura Hakel says. “We are humbly learning about other art scenes while the collection expands.”
Amoedo’s aim, under Hakel’s curatorial guidance, is broad lending of the art she owns to help the artists she champions gain international renown. The artwork she lent to the Venice Biennale is just one example; in 2024 alone she lent pieces to six museums in five countries in the Americas and Europe. The foundation also subsidizes ravel for curators from abroad to visit the studios of living artists in Argentina and Uruguay.
Inés Katzenstein, a curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, invited Amoedo to join the museum’s committee dedicated to Latin American acquisitions (Amoedo is on similar committees at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Buenos Aires’s Museo de Arte Moderno). Katzenstein says that she has seen Amoedo grow and redefine her role in the art world over the time she has known her: “She is someone who understands what she is supporting and what it means to be a creative person, and the challenges that entails.”
To witness that kind of support first-hand, I spent time with Amoedo in José Ignacio, Uruguay, where she has created an artist residency next to a Moorish-style vacation home that once belonged to her grandmother. (An ancestor of Amoedo’s was Uruguay’s second president.)
During the pandemic Amoedo commissioned the avant-garde Argentine artist and designer Edgardo Giménez to transform an outbuilding, christened Casa Neptuna, into a modern retreat that can house two artists at a time, with shared studio space. The residents, chosen by a jury of curators from international museums, receive both monetary grants and staff support for research and development of new work.
The evening of my visit, Amoedo hosts a casual welcome dinner in her home for two artists—one Bolivian, one Mexican—who have just arrived in Uruguay for the first time. I watch as she sandwiches herself between them on a sofa, balancing a dinner plate on her lap and leaning into an intense conversation on indigeneity and identity. I ask her later what that moment felt like. “We have different realities, different points of view,” she says, “but I listen to them, and they accept me. I love that.”
In late 2024 Amoedo welcomed to her home in Buenos Aires Tobias Ostrander, a curator for Latin American art at Tate, and a group of more than two dozen Tate curatorial staffers and patrons who are part of the British museum’s acquisitions group for Latin American art. There is a tour of Amoedo’s collection, and, after an alfresco lunch, the Argentine artist Nicola Costantino performs, dripping “paint” on cakes that are served as dessert.
As Amoedo guides the visitors through the collection, excitedly pulling things out of storage, they are joined by another two dozen people, all from the region. Some are gallerists Amoedo patronizes, but they are mostly the artists whose work inhabits the rooms of this home.
Amoedo later tells me she is thrilled by the cross-pollination, which is not just cultural but generational. True to her approach, she has invited a handful of younger artists to mingle with these emissaries of the cultural establishment. “For now, these emerging artists are not well known,” she says. But one day, if she has her way, “their names will be on everyone’s lips too.”
Photographs by Pompi Gutnisky
This story appears in the February 2025 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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