Stand 36 | 1, 2 and 3rd of September
Author: Galería MCMC
Revelaciones
This exhibition by Cynthia Cohen shows the current state of her perception of the world and the way she understands life and art today. Each painting is an exploration of perceptions that allow her to project internal dynamics outwards. A creative process related to Batlle Planas “inner model” and the free associations of automatism, but with a very different pictorial resolution. It is a shift from consumer pop to metaphysical pop, with elements of camp and surrealism in its use of extravagance, humor and absurdity. As Susan Sontag defines it, Camp is “a sensibility; it is not an idea or a style, but a way of seeing the world”.
The stories are built around situations and images that point her in this new direction. It unites, in a contradictory way, different elements that provoke alienation. The artist is the one who points, who expands the possibilities of the cosmos with new articulations of the real, understanding that the real is also what is hidden and sometimes unhidden. This is what happens in “accept the thoughts that arise”, where the artist constructs a work in which an infinite number of fascinating scenes and thoughts are superimposed, with no apparent logical structure, as happens when we meditate. There are fragments of an antique French Aubusson tapestry, pieces of sashimi, fish, skies, a cornucopia and iron bars.
The hands point and at the same time create paradoxical worlds, as in the scene of the painting “Amazonita”, where an emerald is floating above a mass of green against a mountain landscape. It is the signalling of contradiction, where the absurd is the basis for the production of pictorial discourse. Throughout the Renaissance we find hands with the index finger pointing towards what seems to be the interpretation of the riddle. A secret to be revealed in each story.
We feel the latency of eroticism in tongues coming out of a wallpaper where red prevails in “Libertine”, an installation with digital recreations projected on the walls of the gallery hall.
In “Azurita”, the sensuality of taste is embodied by a tongue licking a creamy cherry, and the senses are heightened to the extreme by the rare beauty of a huge blue stone floating above the landscape.
The stones that Cynthia used in her first exhibition, when she painted them in groups as gems set in rings, are back. At that time, the context was linked to a reflection on economic power as an allusion to the tyranny of the patriarchal institution. These first rings later became enormous protagonists, with perfectly painted jewels of extreme rigour in the faceting and brilliance of each one.
Today, the rocks are structured in an expressive way, far removed from the precision of those days. Now they are part of a crystalline journey in which he has found another goal in his identity as an artist. The conviction that the work activates something ineffable, something that has no name because there is no word to describe it. He places himself in the line of poets and mystics who have sought to bear witness to transcendent experiences.
That is why we cannot rationally understand what is happening in these works, but we must enter into these dwellings proposed by the artist. The history of art has repeatedly tried to manifest the metaphysical dimension, as in the works of Hilma af Klint, Malevich or the Argentinean Xul Solar, among many others.
What makes Cynthia’s work so original is that she materialises these ideas with a contemporary approach, mixing brightly coloured objects against the backdrop of the Argentinean landscape. She also draws on her own history. She reappropriates her artistic autobiography with new meanings.
When she painted flowers, as in jewellery, his “Roses” suggested the success of the perfect appearance, open in its maximum splendour. Today, the flower in his painting “A Wish” has fallen petals, is almost withered and is the only work that, instead of floating, has to be held up. She shamelessly exposes the fall and the melancholic register of the final stage.
Endings, like farewells, are encounters. I celebrate this encounter of a new direction in Cynthia Cohen’s work. It was there from the beginning, but today she has been able to manifest it. I think of the story of the English pilot who, having miscalculated his course, discovered England under the impression that it was an unknown island in the South Sea. And when he planted the flag, he had finally arrived in his own country.
Cynthia discovered in Cruz Chica the key that opened the portal to a new meaning. A belief in art as a transcendent and spiritual revelation.
Laura Batkis
Curator
Hiperestesia
The art of the passage to contemporary art
Marcelo E. Pacheco
Informalism, thresholds, stitching, decollage, other art, driping, are different semblances that enter on a base of paint in superimposed layers of remains of materials, also, drips of different materials such as oil, tempera, collage different from the one that had been given as wire to make the piece: floor rags, rags grids, mixtures of different types of wood, sometimes some cardboard, cardboard and all material, mixed with frames of them. The base is always complete with very outstanding collage temperatures, reaching different kinds of assemblage.
There are different titles for variations and regional schools that show different typologies: informalism, tachism, collage and decollage, and as long as one chooses the superimpositions of materials. The two extremes are abstract expressionism, pure solidity and dualities of oil, working in layers of brushstrokes that burst in different hardness and subtlety, as in the works of Del Prete or Pucciarelli and, in tachismo or informalism that works with traces, marks, stamp, executive transparency, of all kinds of things. The two extremes play with the range of the material that moves away or gets closer and closer to the specific weight and the network of the real.
At the other point of the space appear the abstract or non-figurative with collage as a base and hyper-abundant collage stickers that finally explodes in the assemblages. The first occurs more fully in the New York School culminating with Pollock and locally with Greco and Del Prete. The second occurs with less traversed collage, being protagonist rags grids, floor rags, draped, as Towas, Peluffo, Kemble, Lublin.
With several cast manipulations, different variants with Creole personality are grouped together, making the pieces divided in the graphics and draperies and in the fabrics worked with the tips of the handles of the brushes or their coats.
A special note is the group of works by the Uruguayan Teresa Vila with her semi-abstract paintings. In the territory the games between the freedom of non-figuration and the freedom of non-abstractions.
From informalism to concrete art and kinetic and optical art, different virtual visual forms or boxes with their own supports follow each other.
The total filling of the surface reaches the maximum, even the frames, and they choose multiple bases, the infinitude of choices as a basis for their stories that are non-figurative. The current exhibition is a very good example of diversity.
The general qualities of the informalist language, forms a bundle of figurative works confronted, or interwoven, or directly mixed or in tension. The manner is clearly seen as an astonishing manner since the 1940s, although as a group it was shown in only two exhibitions, both in 1959. This location and this movement of comings and goings and ideas, place Informalism as one of the broad thresholds of passage from modern art to contemporary art. From this point, the neo-criollo informalism of artists such as Peluffo, Greco and Kemble nourish with frictions the three enclaves that since the end of the 1950s have been running towards post-historic art.
The starry ordered by parallel and simultaneous conversations shows a whole possible to be broken or in sets that intermingle.
A sample of the poly-informalism that was deployed throughout the field of objective accidents and adjectives of history and aesthetics.
Manuel Espinosa
Manuel Espinosa (1942 – 2006) Born in Buenos Aires. He attended the National School of Fine Arts and the School of Fine Arts Ernesto de la Cárcova.
After a brief surrealist period, he is co-founder of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención. It subscribes to the Invencionista Manifesto and participates in the exhibitions presented by the group in 1946: in March, that of the Peuser Room; in September, the one organized in the Center for Secondary Education Diploma Teachers; in October, at the Argentine Society of Plastic Artists (SAAP) and in the same month at the Ateneo Popular de La Boca.
Later his work is kept within a geometric abstraction characterized by the repetition of the square or the circle in the entire compositional surface. On this serial arrangement works shadows, superposition and displacements, which allow you to incorporate forward and backward spatial relationships.
Integrates collective exhibitions such as From concrete art to the new trend, Museum of Modern Art (1963), Beyond geometry, Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (1967), Salon Campa- raison, Paris (1967), Twenty-five Argentine artists, National Museum of Fine Arts (1970), International Biennial of Cagnes-sur-Mer, France (1970), Projection and dynamics, Museum of Modern Art of the Ville de Paris (1973), Current Trends in Argentine Art, Art Center of International Reunions, Nice, France (1974), among others.
In the decade of the ‘80 participates in the exhibitions of the trend called “sensible abstraction”, among which is Geometry 81, presented at the Provincial Museum of Fine Arts of La Plata. In the city of Buenos Aires integrates geometry. Tribute to Max Bill, organized by the Center for Art and Communication, Sensitive Abstraction, shows that it accompanies the Days of Criticism, both held in 1981 and From Constructivism to Sensitive Geometry, presented at Harrods in May 1992, among others.
Participates in the main exhibitions that deal with the development of abstraction in the Río de la Plata. These include Tribute to the Argentine avant-garde of the 1940s, held at Galería Arte Nuevo (1976), Vanguardias of the 1940s. Concrete Art-Invention. Arte Madí. Perceptismo, Eduardo Sívori Museum (1980) and among the most recent, in abstract art from Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires and Montevideo 1933/53, presented at The Americas Society, New York (2001).
In 2001, the Juan B. Castagnino Museum in Rosario dedicated a tribute to him.
María Boneo
María Boneo (1959, Belgrade, Yugoslavia) is an Argentine artist based in Buenos Aires. She studied at the National School of Fine Arts, Argentina; at the Statuaria Arte, Carrara, Italy; and in the studios of sculptors Leo Vinci, Aurelio Macchi, Miguel Angel Bengochea y Beatriz Soto García. She received several awards and mentions, including the Mention of the Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales (2014), the Second Prize at the Salón de Grabado y Escultura Ernesto de la Cárcova (2003) and the First Prize of Scultpure at the Museo Antonio Ballvé (2002). She participated in group and solo shows in institutions such as the Museo Sívori, Palais de Glace, MCMC Galería, and the Museo de Arte Decorativo, in Buenos Aires. Her work was part of art fairs in in Brazil, England, Argentina, United States, and France. Her two monograph books were published in 2019 and 2010, edited by Manuela López Anaya. She is currently part of the Collective 62, an artist platform in Miami, United States.
María Boneo´s work revolves around the use of sculpture to explore one of her main interests: the curvy lines reminiscent of the nest, the womb, and the female figure. By embracing abstraction, Boneo creates volumes which are abundant on convexities and concavities. These are built from diverse materials that introduce color, texture, reflection, temperature, and the presence of the block material. Boneo employs traditional materials, such as marble, wood, and bronze. She also experiments with nickel plated bronze, colored resins, and different types of stones, all of these allow her to achieve the intended nuances, polishing and lacquering. The core of her practice is based on the presence of a particular evocative sensuality, breaking away from obvious associations. Her sculptures set themselves as sensuous bodies, combining both rigidity and coldness while providing a silent and quiet reflection on the origin of life and its constant movements.
Geometrías en paralelo
Ary Brizzi and María Martorell
Few artists shared as many spaces and a common vision as Ary Brizzi and María Martorell. Although they were only circumstantially part of a group, criticism and history brought them together.
By the mid-1950s, geometry had become a movement of great intensity, variety and international projection. It was the language of Modernism in painting, design, architecture and the arts in general. In Argentina, a third wave, called neo-concretism, emerged after the tradition forged by artists of the stature of Tomás Maldonado, Alfredo Hlito, Enio Iommi, Gyula Kosice, Arden Quin and Raúl Lozza, among the masters of the 1940s.
María Martorell was born in Salta in 1909. Ary Brizzi, in Buenos Aires in 1930. They belonged to the same artistic generation despite the significant age difference between them. María married young, raised a family and postponed her vocation, like many women of her time. Ary, already at the age of 15, while attending the School of Fine Arts, worked with her father and brother in architecture and interior design. They are two different lives that converge in the same passion, sustained with talent and tenacity. The first time they exhibited together was in 1963, when Romero Brest invited them to the exhibition Eight Constructive Artists, at the National Museum of Fine Arts, together with Manuel Espinosa, Raul Lozza, Eduardo Sabelli, Miguel Angel Vidal and Carlos Silva. That same year, 1963, the panoramic exhibition Del Arte Concreto a la Nueva Tendencia [1]included both artists and categorically identified them with that “new tendency”. A new trend that, starting from the main concepts of concrete art (total abstraction and autonomy of form, abolition of illusionism, scientific aesthetics), ventured to go further, transforming geometry according to the laws of the human eye. The “generative art”[2], optical and kinetic, more linked to Europe, and the color field and the hard edge, of American origin, made up the innovations that both Martorell and Brizzi practiced in those nascent 1960s.[3]
With a similar background, based on Bauhaus methodology, the heritage of Russian constructivism and the external and local tradition of concrete art, Brizzi and Martorell chose to work in series, introducing small variations on a given initial proposition; investigating the syntax of color in relation to forms, real or virtual movement, light and its infinite plastic and symbolic implications.
The artistic model of personalities such as Max Bill – winner in 1952 of the grand prizes at the first South American biennial, the São Paulo Biennial – and Victor Vasarely, who exhibited his work in Buenos Aires in 1958 after participating in the IV Biennial, left their mark on the poetics of geometry and multidisciplinary development. Both artists and designers blurred the boundaries of art.
Martorell witnessed the changes from Europe. He lived there for two years, between 1955 and 1956, and avidly visited museums and workshops of contemporary artists such as Georges Vantongerloo, Nicolas Schöeffer and Jesús Soto, who were embarking on the new geometric directions.
With its vocation for total abstraction, concrete art had left a question floating in the air for the next generation to resolve: what is the subject of painting? Centuries of figurative art, of representation, had put geometry at the crossroads of having to defend itself from the consideration of being a “decorative style”.
The theme of a work of art, Martorell pointed out, is “its harmony, its rhythm. The theme is only the means of directing our attention towards appearances and inviting us to go through those appearances to reach its spirit”.
In line with these reflections, Brizzi asserted that painting is a “unique fact caused by the use of a unique medium”, that the “plastic fact” is given without support in any other reality than itself and its purpose is “to sensitize human perception and its inner vision”.
Thus, was born a painting that is as close to the eye as it is to the unapproachable “inside”, to the spirit of both the artist and his audience. However, this approach without known objects, metaphors, or literary narratives gradually became a language that encapsulated the most basic and yet most sophisticated forms of human perception. Governed by the laws of vision, sensual curves navigate through spaces of clear colors; they attract, repel, change course. A beam of light breaks a plane, shatters into the colors that form it. Circles and lines reverberate in the extreme contrast of black and white. These were just some of the themes of geometry that Martorell and Brizzi worked on, filling their canvases with musical resonances. Precisely music, in its extreme abstraction, was one of the models used to think these compositions detached from representation, as strict and rational as close to emotions.
Artists with a vocation for knowledge, both were self-trained in the reading of diverse materials that concentrated the interests of their time: science, technology, the extension of art to design and daily life.
From the beginning, Brizzi designed and applied his artistic patterns to pieces of graphic art and advertising. The “studies” he carried out between 1955 and 1962 are works in themselves and show that application to communication which, no one doubts anymore, does not reside only in words. Using state-of-the-art materials such as synthetic enamels, then acrylics and innovative metallic alloys, he painted, created sculptures and practiced a craft that he then called “commercial architecture” and that covered the urgent needs of exhibition in the innovative industrial fairs of the economic bonanza of developmentalism.
On this path of art extension, Martorell, enraptured by the medieval tapestries she had seen in France, wondered what would be the destiny of tapestry from Salta, still considered a handicraft. Tuning tradition with modernity would allow her to speak of a contemporary textile art based on pre-Inca motifs, the myths and legends of the Argentine Northwest and the expert hands that still executed them. From this incursion was born the collaboration with Salta artist Carlos Luis “Pajita” García Bez and his weavers, who combined Andean geometry with contemporary geometry in Martorell’s designs; a virtuous encounter that still echoes today and the textile boom.
During the 70’s, in the Acrylics Paolini company awards, Brizzi and Martorell were also keen to create “useful” (design) and “useless” (artistic) objects with the precious material, acrylic, which connoted the beauty and practicality of modern life.
At the same time as these explorations, in 1966, Brizzi and Martorell were part of Grupo 13 (G13), which had its presentation in Buenos Aires [4]and represented a true compendium of the geometric tendencies of the time. The exhibition received excellent comments, such as those of the critic Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, who saw in its excellence the counterpart of the Braque Prize, dedicated to celebrating the “nothings of the Pops”.[5]
Indeed, the new geometry was contemporary to other trends in figuration such as pop or the youth of the “urban myths”, as the French critic Pierre Restany described them.
That same year, Brizzi and Martorell participated in 11 Pintores Constructivos, in which they coincided once again with Espinosa, Mac Entyre and Vidal. Obviously, these coincidences are not coincidental-nor is the current one we are presenting-since, unlike other trends in contemporary art, geometry was a space of confluences rather than differences. It signified an international language, a sort of Esperanto of forms, for which Europeans and Americans in general had been fighting since the beginning of the twentieth century; a language that, like all languages, gradually incorporated “words” that made it as accessible as figuration had been traditionally. Light, the pictorial representation of light, was one of them. The scales of values, also called degradé, burst into the work of Brizzi and Martorell to blur planes, turn color into atmosphere, deny the two-dimensionality of the support or launch into a world of visual and symbolic suggestions that were previously labeled as naturalistic.
Geometry accompanies us today as evidence of a place of mastery in Argentine art. It was a trend that triumphed at international level, which was loaded with new meanings accompanying the times, but which, essentially, speaks from modernity.
María José Herrera
Historian and curator. Author of the book Ary Brizzi. The Harmony of Modernity (in press 2023) and co-author of María Martorell. The energy of color (2013)
[1] Organized by the Museum of Modern Art of the city of Buenos Aires (MAM).
[2] Creado por Eduardo Mac Entyre y Miguel Ángel Vidal en 1960.
[3] They also coincided in Beyond Geometry (1967), an anthological exhibition that introduced the “new sculpture”, the primary structures, held at the Di Tella Institute, on Florida Street.
[4] Exhibiting with Armando Durante, Manuel Espinosa, María Juana Heras Velasco, Jorge Lezama, Mac Entyre, César Paternosto, Alejandro Puente, Sabelli, Carlos Silva, María Simón and Vidal.
[5] Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, “Dos caras de una medalla”, El Mundo newspaper, Buenos Aires, July 31, 1966.
Carmelo Arden Quin
Carmelo Heriberto Alves, Rivera, Uruguay, 1913 – Paris, France, 2010. The Catalonian writer Emilio Sans, a friend of his family, introduced him to the Plastic Arts. In 1935 he met Joaquín Torres García during a conference at the Theosophist Society seat, and though he initially adopted his aesthetic guidelines, in 1936 he made his first non-orthogonal paintings, transgressing the traditional limits of the frame confinement. He exhibited those works at the Casa de España, Montevideo, within the framework of a demonstration supporting the Spanish Republic. By the end of 1937 he settled in Buenos Aires where he frequented avant-guard artists and studied Philosophy and Literature in the University. In this city he shared his atelier with the Chilean artist Miguel Martínez, who introduced him to Gyula Kosice, at the time a teenager dedicated to leather goods.
In 1941 he took part in the founding of a bimonthly newspaper, El Universitario, where he published his political and aesthetic ideas. He was also a member of the editing group for Arturo magazine, issued only once in 1944.
In 1946, following aesthetic divergences, two organizations were formed: the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención and the Madí Group. As a member of the latter, Arden Quin participated in the four exhibitions hosted by the Galería Van Riel and by the Escuela Libre de Artes Plásticas Altamira (Free School of Plastic Arts Altamira) during the last six months of that year. He also took part in the First International Madí Exhibition, organized at the Ateneo de Montevideo, Uruguay. He exhibited polygonal- framed works, movable and co-planar structures, object-pictures, and concave-convex works.
In 1948 he travelled to Paris, where he frequented Michel Seuphor, Marcelle Cahn, Auguste Herbin, Jean Arp, Georges Braque and Francis Picabia, among other vanguard artists. There he had various exhibitions, and participated in the Salon des Realités Nouvelles.
He returned to Argentina in 1954, and together
with Aldo Pellegrini founded the Asociación Arte Nuevo (New Art Association) –integrated by artists of different non-figurative tendencies– that had its first exhibition at the Galería Van Riel in 1955.
Back to Paris he continued with his work, and during this period he introduced collage and découpage to his works, resources that he exclusively used until 1971, when he retook painting. In 1962 he created the Ailleurs magazine, and during that decade he participated in the Concrete Poetry movement.
Among his last exhibitions, his most outstanding ones were hosted by the Galerie Charley Chevalier, Paris (1973); the Galerie Quincampoix, Paris (1977); the Exhibition in Tribute to His Sixty Years, by the Espace Latin-Americain, Paris (1983); the Galeria Niza, Brescia (1986); the Galerie Down Town, Paris (1987); the Gallery El Patio, Bremen, Germany (1988), and the Foundation for Art and Technology, Madrid (1997). In 1998 the Ruth Benzacar Gallery in Buenos Aires organized an important monographic exhibition under the title Carmelo Arden Quin, Paintings and Objects 1945-1995. He also participated in important collective exhibitions, such as Art in Latin America, The Modern Era (1820-1990), at the Hayward Gallery, London (1989); Argentina, Concrete Art Invention 1945, Madí Group 1946, at the Rachel Adler Gallery, New York (1990); Arte Madí Art, at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1997); and the Abstract Art from the Rio de la Plata, Buenos Aires and Montevideo 1933/53 exhibition, at The Americas Society of New York (2001).
He died in Paris on September 27th 2010.
Victor Magariños D.
Víctor Magariños D. (Lanús, Buenos Aires Province, 1924 – Pinamar, Buenos Aires Province, 1993) trained at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano, in the city of Buenos Aires, where he would later work as an art teacher. In 1946, he founded the Grupo Joven, made up of different artists from his generation. In 1947, he received the Prins award from the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes. He travelled to Paris in 1951 sponsored by the French government, where he got acquainted with artists George Vantongerloo, Fernand Léger, Max Bill, among others. At this point in time he defined a language for his work related to abstraction. Back in Argentina, he continued to create and teach in Buenos Aires until 1967, when he decided to move to the coastal town of Pinamar, just feet away from the Atlantic Ocean. From this location, he stayed connected to artistic and scientific communities from all over the world.
Some of his solo exhibitions include: the Gallery San Cristóbal of the Instituto de Arte Moderno (Buenos Aires, 1951), Magariños D. at the Centro Venezolano-Argentino de Cooperación Cultural y Científico Tecnológica (Caracas, 1974), Pinturas, vanguardia y retaguardia. Primera muestra luego de 33 años off Buenos Aires at Instituto CAYC (Buenos Aires, 1984), Victor Magariños D. – Finito infinito – Homenaje a Vantongerloo at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts (Brussels, 1986), Victor Magariños D. Obras 1950/1990 at the Fundación Banco Patricios (Buenos Aires, 1991), the retrospective Victor Magariños D. 1924/1993 at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires, 1999), Victor Magariños D. at Galería Van Eyck (Buenos Aires, 2000 and 2005), Presencias reales at MUNTREF (Buenos Aires, 2011), Transmisiones sensibles de un cosmos at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Sur (Lanús, Buenos Aires, 2016), Victor Magariños D. Works on paper from the 1950s to the 1990s at Cecilia Brunson Projects (London, 2019), Victor Magariños D. En silencio at MC galería (Buenos Aires, 2022), and numerous exhibitions at the Víctor Magariños D. House-Museum in Pinamar—which he inaugurated in 2002.
Some group exhibitions he participated in include: place at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1953, XXVIII Venice Biennial (Venice, 1956), Del arte concreto a las Nuevas Tendencias at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (1963), Premio Di Tella (Buenos Aires, 1964), X Bienal de San Pablo (1969), Contemporary Art, 1942-72: Collection of the Albright- Knox Gallery (New York, 1972), Summer exhibition and Visible and tangible form at Simon Dickinson (London, 2022), Belgium-Argentina. Transatlantic modernisms, 1910-1958 at Mu.ZEE Oostende (Belgium, 2022), among others.
His work belongs to the collections of several Argentinian national museums such as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA), the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Latinoamericano de La Plata (MACLA) and Museo Castagnino+macro de Rosario. Some international institutions that acquired his work are the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Paraguay, as well as numerous private collections.
Horacio Zabala
Horacio Zabala was born in Buenos Aires in 1943. He is an artist and an architect (UBA). Since his early exhibitions, he has explored things, their images and situations. Through his artistic practice, he creates, redirects or transforms some inert and obscure relationships around him to ascribe different identities and meanings to them. Between 1972 and 1976, he was part of the Grupo de los trece at the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (Center for Art and Communication, CAYC), where, in 1973, Jorge Glusberg presented his “Anteproyectos”, an inaugural exhibit that makes up an extensive work program that would influence his later poetics. Between 1976 and 1998 he lived in Rome, Vienna and Geneva; he currently resides in Buenos Aires.
Since 1970, he has carried out many solo and group exhibitions in Europe and America. In 2004, he was awarded the Primer Premio Adquisición at the Salon Nacional de Rosario; in 2005, the Gran Premio Adquisición at the Salon Nacional de Artes Visuales; in 2018, the Achievement Award from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Art Collection in Miami.
His works belong to collections of public and private institutions, including:
The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de Sâo Paulo, Sao Paulo; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix; Museo de Arte Tigre, Buenos Aires province; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile; Middlebrough Institute of Modern Art, England; Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zürich; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario, Rosario; J. P. Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York; Colección Fundación Alon para las Artes, Buenos Aires. Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, Nueva York.
María Juana Heras Velasco
María Juanas Heras Velasco (1924 – 2014). In 1945 she graduated from the teaching staff of Cience in the Normal School n1 “Pte. Roque Saenz Peña”, in Buenos Aires where she settled with her family. After completing the teaching degree, and encouraged by her parents, began her training artistic.
In 1946 she attended the Altamira free school of plastic arts, where she studied drawing and painting with Emilio Pettoruti, and sculpture with Lucio Fontana.
In the same place, she took lessons of esthetic with Jorge Romero Brest and also, of Vision with Héctor Cartier. In 1947, after the school was dissolved, she continued to attend classes with Pettoruti in the old building of Charcas 1783: after some time, she set up her own workshop with their teachers and another artists like Pablo Edelstein, Víctor Chab and Febo Martí. From then on, and until the beginning of the `60 participated in national and provincial salon.
In December 1952 she married Alberto Victoriano and with him she shared the interest in poetry and prose, including that of the so called “bet generation”, which manifested itself in some of their works. Together they made three trips to Europe in 1964, 1971 and 1980, they visited also New York City.
She held her first individual exhibition in 1958, in Van Riel gallery. Shortly after, in the middle of the years `60 the artist abandoned the tradicional techniques of the sculpture to start or experiment with others materials and procedures of industrial origin. So, she made sculptures and motifs in acrylic reliefs, like many artists then, due to the calls made by the Salón Plastica con Plasticos (MNBA, 1966), and organized by the Cámara Argentina de la Industria Plástica and the salon of artists with acrylics of Paolini (MAMBA, 1972 y 1973).
In 1971 she presented at the Arte Nuevo gallery the first of her Transposeñas, as she would call from now on many of her sculptures. The artist conceived these works from elements of urban signs. She seeks with her pieces of art speak the language of her time, generor strangeness and reflection on the omnipresence of these artefacts of normative character that are part of the urban landscape that we inhabit. The Tranposeñas and the urban landscape, from now on will be the axis of her many of individual exhibitions.