Woolwich gallery opens Josefina Auslender show amid wider acclaim

Josefina Auslender is getting a rare Midcoast double billing, and Woolwich viewers can see why now. Sarah Bouchard Gallery opened La Chimera del Oro on April 11 at 13 Nequasset Pines Road, and the show stays up through May 17 just as Bowdoin College Museum of Art is mounting the first museum retrospective devoted to Auslender’s drawings.

The Woolwich exhibition is Auslender’s second solo presentation with Sarah Bouchard Gallery, a sign that the relationship between the 91-year-old artist and the gallery has grown beyond a one-time appearance. The work on view includes new ink pieces alongside graphite drawings from her time in Argentina, giving visitors a direct look at the arc of a career that still crosses decades, countries and techniques.

One work identified in the exhibition is an untitled 2026 ink-on-paper piece measuring 12.25 by 12 inches. The broader show centers on memory, artistic labor and the pull of wealth, with the chimera in the title serving as a fitting image for something alluring, beautiful and potentially consuming. That conceptual edge is what makes the exhibition more than a tidy spring stop in Woolwich. It offers a chance to see an artist still pressing at the boundaries of form and idea.

Auslender’s local profile has also widened sharply through Bowdoin’s Josefina Auslender: Drawing Myself Free, which runs through May 31 in the Bernard and Barbro Osher Gallery and Halford Gallery. Bowdoin says the retrospective includes more than 100 drawings, while a later museum feature described more than 80, underscoring the scale of a project that reaches across continents and decades. Bowdoin identifies Auslender as Argentine-born, born in Buenos Aires in 1934, active in midcentury Buenos Aires before committing herself to drawing in the 1970s, and later a Maine resident after settling in Cape Elizabeth in 1991. The retrospective was organized with International Artists Manifest, and curator Cassandra Mesick Braun is overseeing the museum presentation.

For Woolwich, the timing matters. Sarah Bouchard Gallery says it stages about five exhibitions each season, helping draw steady traffic into a rural stretch of Midcoast Maine and linking the town to a spring arts circuit that includes Bowdoin in Brunswick and attention from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Buenos Aires. In a county where culture and small business often move together, La Chimera del Oro gives residents a reason to drive out Nequasset Pines Road and spend time, and money, in Woolwich.