Carlos Leppe

Carlos Francisco Leppe Arroyo was notable as a Chilean performance artist. Carlos Leppe's artistic career began with conventional plastic media, but he is recognised as a major exponent, and the originator, of performance art in Chile. The practice of performance art is also known in Chile as 'art actions'. Leppe used his own body in an artistic practice born of the tension between personal self-identity and the cultural expectations which regulate social behaviour. He was a key figure in the neo-avant-garde ‘Advanced Scene’, which included—among others—the artists Carlos Altamirano, Juan Castillo, Juan Domingo Dávila, Alfredo Jaar and Lotty Rosenfeld, and the writers Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita.