Cerrar

Alfredo Hlito

Born in Buenos Aires in 1923, Alfredo Hlito attended the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. His first works showed a considerable influence of the Uruguayan Joaquín Torres García, though some years later he turned towards clearer forms and implemented a more abstract sense of composition. In 1945 he was a charter member of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, and signed the Inventionist Manifesto in 1946.

His austere and personal style remained unchanged throughout great part of his work. During the concrete period (1945-1955) he wrote extensively on the problems of this type of abstraction, and those texts were compiled in 1995 by the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes.

He took part, together with other members of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención in the Salon des Realités Nouvelles, Paris, as well as in the New Realities exhibition at the Van Riel gallery, Buenos Aires, both in 1948.

In 1951 he collaborated with Tomas Maldonado in the founding of Nueva Visión magazine. In 1954 he received the Acquisition Award from the II Biennial Exhibition of San Pablo, and the following year he participated in the XXVIII Biennial International Art Exhibition of Venice.

In 1964 he travelled to Mexico, where he lived until 1973.

He was a Number Member of the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes as from 1984. In 1987 the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes organized an important retrospective exhibition of his works, Alfredo Hlito. Obra pictórica 1945/1985 (Alfredo Hlito, Pictorial Work 1945/1985).

He also participated in important collective exhibitions, such as Vanguardias de la década de los 40. Arte Concreto-Invención. Arte Madí. Perceptismo at the Eduardo Sivori Museum (1980); Argentina, Concrete Art Invention 1945, Madí Group 1946 at the Rachel Adler Gallery, New York (1990); in the Art from Argentina 1920/1994 exhibition opened at Modern Art Oxford, 1994, a travelling exhibition that after visiting several European countries, was closed at the Centro Cultural Borges, Buenos Aires, in 1995.

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.

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.

Throughout her career, she has networked numerous collectives and individual exhibitions in she scopes national and internacional. She obtains awards and distinctions as: Primer Premio, Salón Nacional de Escultura (1983), Primer Premio, Fundación Fortabat (1984), Premio a la Trayectoria Artística, Fondo Nacional de las Artes(1998),Premio“Leonardo” a la Trayectoria (1999), Premio Cultura Nación (2007), y 4 Premios Konex (1982,1992,2012,2012).

Actually her works are exhibit in differents museums from Argentina: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires; Museo de Artes Plásticas “Eduardo Sivori”; Fondo Nacional de las Artes; Museo Castagnino  MACRO; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de La Plata; Municipio de Resistencia, provincia de Chaco; Museo de Bellas Artes de Tres Arroyos; Museo Universitario de Arte de la Universidad de Cuyo; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo.

Silvia Torras

Silvia Torras (1935 – 1970) arrived in Argentina with her parents the same year of her birth. She studied at the Manuel Belgrano and Prilidiano Pueyrredón Schools of Fine Arts and continued her training in 1956 at Kenneth Kemble’s workshop. She developed her work in a short period of time, three years from 1960. She was a central artist within informalism. Within the informalist map, tending to chromatic parsimony, her works are distinguished by the use of color in an exuberant way from dripping, successive layers of paint and extensive brushstrokes.

In his abstract canvases, vegetal elements are fused. He had two solo exhibitions in galleries, the first at the Peuser Gallery, the second at Lirolay. He was part of a series of important group exhibitions, among them the prestigious Premio di Tella 63 and before that, in 1961, of Arte Destructivo at the Lirolay Gallery, a hinge experience towards conceptualism, happenings and performances that would define the landscape of the second half of the ’60s. In 1962 he exhibited at Peuser and obtained the Honorable Mention in the Ver y Estimar Award; in 1963 he participated for the second time in the Ver y Estimar contest and was part of the selection for the Di Tella Award. He also exhibited in the exhibition Arte Argentino Actual, held at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

In 1963 he abandoned painting and settled in Mexico. His work is included in public and private collections such as the National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA), Museum of Modern Art (MAMBA) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, among others.

Juana Butler

He was born in Buenos Aires in 1928. He studied at Horacio Butler’s studio, his uncle, and at the National School of Fine Arts. It was around the age of 23 when she began to exhibit. In the first exhibitions she was presented as Juana Bullrich, her married name, but it was around 1961 and 1962 (as a result of her divorce) that she stopped using that name and began to appear as Juana Butler.


Her first individual exhibition was held in 1955 at the Antígona Gallery. Among her subsequent individual exhibitions, we can highlight the Van Riel Gallery in 1959, Rubbers Gallery in 1961, 1962 and in 1968 together with Juan Campodónico and Carlos Leone, in the Contemporary Gallery the following year, in 1974 in Arte Nuevo Gallery, in Ruth Benzacar in 1977, Del Retiro Gallery in 1980 and in Jacques Martínez Contemporary Art Gallery in 1985. He made an itinerant exhibition of 20 works in Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico between 1972 and 1975 organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Argentina. In 2003 a great retrospective of his last 30 years of painting was held at the Recoleta Cultural Center.


She participated in the Second Salon of Young Argentine Painting at the Institute of Modern Art in 1950, in the Ver y Estimar Award at the National Museum of Fine Arts in 1961 and 1962, and in the María Calderón de la Barca Foundation Award by the National Academy, Witcomb Gallery in 1966. He was part of the exhibition held at the Sociedad Hebraica called Tendencias Surrealistas en la Argentina in 1965, of the Self-Portraits exhibition organized by the Rubbers Gallery the following year, where he shared the space with renowned artists such as Roberto Aizenberg, Juan Batlle Planas, Antonio Berni, Juan Grela, Ricardo Garabito and Emilio Pettoruti, among others, and participated in the Surrealist Exhibition Homage to Juan Batlle Planas, Proar Gallery in 1967. He represented Argentina in the First Latin American Art Biennial of São Paulo in 1978, with a shipment of 15 oil paintings of the series Origins and Exhalagos. His works are part of renowned private collections. He passed away in the city of Buenos Aires in March 2017.

María Martorell

María Martorell(1909 – 2010) Born in Salta, Argentina. In 1942, she began painting under the tutelage of the artist and set designer Ernesto M. Scotti. It is also around this time that she began to travel constantly to Buenos Aires, a city where abstraction was growing strongly, generating a new avant-garde movement. In 1946 she exhibited at the National Salon and in 1949 she received the First Prize at the First Annual Salta Painting Salon. This same year she received the First Prize at the Salón Amigos del Arte. In 1952, the artist settled in Madrid where she attended to the free workshops of the Fine Arts Association and the Museum of the San Fernando Academy.

In 1954 she traveled to Paris, where she settled for a few years, linking up with the Denise René Art Gallery, which promoted abstraction and mainly works of an optical and kinetic nature.

At the beginning of the 1960s, and under the direction of Jorge Romero Brest as director of the National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA), an intense modernizing program was proposed that included, for the first time, various exhibitions of contemporary Argentine art, legitimizing in this way, Martorell’s work in the national context of abstraction.

The 1960s were the years with the greatest visibility of Martorell’s work. At the beginning of the decade she traveled to New York, where she connected with neo-figuration, pop-art, happenings, kineticism and the dematerialization of the work. In 1961 she had a solo exhibition at the Collector’s Gallery in New York and his first tapestry show in Salta. In 1962 he exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile and in 1963 he joined the exhibition Ocho artistas constructivos, at the MNBA, in Buenos Aires, invited by its director Jorge Romero Brest. In 1967 she opened a solo exhibition of tapestries executed by Cafayate textile artisans at the El Sol gallery in Buenos Aires. That year she also participated in the National Salon and the exhibition Beyond Geometry, at the Di Tella Institute.

In 1974 she presented an individual exhibition at the Venezuelan-Argentine Center for Scientific- Technological Cultural Cooperation in Caracas. In

1975 he presented two important exhibitions, both at the Bonino gallery in Buenos Aires and at the Avril gallery in Mexico. In 1977 she held a solo exhibition at the San Diego Gallery in Bogotá, culminating the decade with a large exhibition at the OAS headquarters in Washington D.C called Pinturas de María Martorell.

As part of the recognition of her artistic work, on December 22, 1980, the Academy of Fine Arts appointed María Martorell as academic delegate for the province of Salta. In 1982 she held a solo show called El pintor y su memoria, at the Unión Carbide Argentina space in Buenos Aires and in 1985 at the Centoira gallery. In 1989, she received the Artistic Merit Award granted by the government of the province of Salta. In 1990, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (MAMBA) organized a retrospective exhibition of his work, called De la Figuración a la abstracción 1948-1990. During that decade and the next, she continued to actively participate in the artistic scene, both in Buenos Aires and Salta, with various individual and collective exhibitions in spaces such as the Recoleta Cultural Center, the Palais de Glace, the MAMBA and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jump

On July 26, 2010, she died in the city of Salta. In the 20th edition of ArteBA, a tribute called María Martorell: La energía desencadenada (1909-2010) was realized. In 2013, the Museum of Fine Arts of Salta held the tribute exhibition La Energía del Color, where works from different stages of the artist were presented.

Eduardo Costa

Eduardo Costa (1940, Buenos Aires) is an argentine artist who lived twenty five years in the US and four in Brazil. He started his career in Buenos Aires as part of the Di Tella generation and continued to work in NYC, where he made a strong contribution to the local avant-garde. He collaborated with American artists Vito Acconci, Scott Burton, John Perreault and Hannah Weiner, among others. In Brazil, he participated in projects organized by Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Antonio Manuel, Lygia Clark, and others from the school of Rio. His work has been discussed in Art in America, Art Forum, and in the main books on conceptual art: A. Alberro, MIT, 1999; P. Osborne, Phaedon, 2002; Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, Yale/Houston Museum of Art, 2004; Inés. Katzenstein, MoMA, New York, 2004, Luis Pérez- Oramas and others, San Antonio Museum of Art, 2004; Luis Camnitzer, Uni- versity of Texas, 2007, among others.

In 2017 the Tamayo Museum of Mexico has a retrospective exhibition of the artist called: “Mental Relations”.

His works belong to the following collections: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; Museum of modern Art in Río de Ja- neiro; Modern Museum of Art of Buenos Aires; Museum of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires; Jumex Collection, Mexico DF; Mercantil Bank in Cara- cas, and other insti- tutional collections.


He has exhibited at the New Museum, New York; Victoria and Albert Mu- seum, London; Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Mass .; Miami Art Museum, Miami; Jumex Foundation, Mexico City; Vienna Secession, Vienna, Austria; Lisson Gallery, London; Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo; Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires; National Museum of Fine Arts, BA; Malba- Fundación Costan- tini, BA; Tamayo Museum, Mexico and others. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.