Allegra Pacheco

Allegra’s exhibitions span from Japan to Europe and America. Allegra works in a variety of mediums, with her work predominantly painting and photography, but often expanding into, sculpture and installation, and most recently documentary film. Since 2016 Pacheco has been almost exclusively dedicated to directing her first feature documentary, recently completed in 2021, titled “Salaryman”. Set in the world of Japanese blue-collar businessmen, this film explores the lives of office workers and simultaneously tracks the artist’s personal self-discovery along the way. Humming with the kinetic energy of Tokyo and featuring a rich, multi-dimensional score by James Iha (co-founder of the Smashing Pumpkins and A Perfect Circle) Salaryman combines performance art and a punk documentary ethic to open our minds to the cost of overwork, ultimately revealing surprising ways how salarymen, in every culture, can find escape and healing. The documentary has been presented in several film festivals through 2021 and 2022, in which it had won the recognitions of best documentary, best director, best score, among others. Before and parallel to her dedication to the documentary, from 2008 to 2018, she had presented solo shows in MoMo Gallery and Just Another Space in Tokyo, in LAMB Arts and London New Castle in London, as in Despacio, Klaus Steinmetz Contemporary and Vienti4/siete Gallery in Costa Rica. Actually, in 2012, Pacheco exhibited her first major installation work, ‘Boobs’, a series of breast-shaped soft sculptures made in collaboration with disenfranchised women from La Carpio, an immigrant neighbourhood in Costa Rica. The exhibition space took on the innocence of a children’s playground, but at the same time served as a platform whereby feminist issues and taboo subjects such as sexuality could be addressed in an un-biased environment. Allegra has been artist-in-residency in LAMB Arts artist-in-residence program, London, U.K. in 2015, and at The Backers Foundation and AIT Residence Programme, Tokyo, in 2013. In 2014, Allegra’s first photography book, titled “88 Days in Japan” was published by Editorial Germinal, making a debut in the Salon du Livre, Paris. Pacheco’s work is included in important collections, most recently in Mori collection (Mori Art Museum owners private collection, Tokyo), Fundacion Massaveu (Madrid), Francisco Cantos (Chair in ARCO, Madrid), and Takeo Obayashi (Tokyo).

Born: in San José, Costa Rica