Biography

Born in Buenos Aires in 1928. She studied at the studio of Horacio Butler, her uncle, and at the National School of Fine Arts. It was around the age of 23 that she began to exhibit. In the first exhibitions she was presented as Juana Bullrich, her married name, but it was around 1961 and 1962 (following 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 Galería Antígona. Among her later solo exhibitions, we can highlight the Van Riel Gallery in 1959, the 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 the New Art Gallery, in Ruth Benzacar in 1977, in the Del Retiro Gallery in 1980 and in the Jacques Martínez Contemporary Art Gallery in 1985. She held a travelling exhibition of 20 works in Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico between 1972 and 1975, organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Argentine Republic.  In 2003 a large retrospective of her  last 30 years of painting was held at the Centro Cultural Recoleta. 

She participated in the Second Salon of Young Argentinean Painting at the Institute of Modern Art in 1950, in the Ver y Estimar Prize at the National Museum of Fine Arts in 1961 and 1962, and in the María Calderón de la Barca Foundation Prize at the National Academy, Witcomb Gallery in 1966. 

She took part in the exhibition held at the Sociedad Hebraica called Tendencias Surrealistas en la Argentina in 1965, in the Self-Portraits exhibition organised by the Rubbers Gallery the following year, where she 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. She represented Argentina at the First Latin American Art Biennial of São Paulo in 1978, with a consignment of 15 oil paintings from the series Orígenes y Exhalagos (Origins and Exhalagos). 

Her works are part of the collections of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Museo de Arte Moderno and renowned private collections. She died in Buenos Aires in March 2017.

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 (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.

César Paternosto (1931) was born in La Plata, Argentina. He is a painter and sculptor. Since 1967 he lived in New York and in 2004 he moved to Segovia (Spain) where he presented a retrospective exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum Esteban Vicente with the curatorship of Tomás Llorens. In 1969, Paternosto started a series of white and uniform works and began to paint on the wide edges of the frame.

In 1972, he won the Guggenheim Scholarship. He had numerous solo and group exhibitions both at the United States, as well as in Latin America and Europe. In 2010 the architects Rafael Moneo and Pedro Elcuaz invited him to intervene the lobby of the Atocha Station in Madrid for which the artist ideated an arrangement of colored rectangles that seem to appear and disappear as the traveler or viewer walks by. He recently exhibited at the Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid (Spain) at the exhibition called “Towards Painting as Object” that established a dialogue between paintings by the artist and works from the museum’s personal collection (november, 2017- january, 2018).

His works are included in public and private collections such as: the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, the Art Center National Museum Reina Sofía in Madrid, The Ford Foundation in New York, as well as in the National Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art and the Latin American Art Museum in Buenos Aires. His works also belong to private collections such as the Diana and Bruce Halle Collection, Arizona (USA); the Patrica Phelps Cisneros Collection; the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami; and the Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza and Norman Foster Collections in Madrid (Spain).

Rogelio Polesello (1939-2014) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Painter and sculptor, presented his first individual exhibition in 1959 at the Peuser gallery where it was expressed his admiration for Victor Vasarely. Shortly after his geometry obtained references of the New Abstraction with resources of the optical artists, such as the offset of geometric shapes, producing a strong effect of instability. He worked with painting, printmaking and acrylic objects capable of generating optical effects that break the image. He made numerous indivudual exhibitions, including highlights of the Pan American Union in Washington in 1961, Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas in 1966 and 1968, Center of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute Visual Arts in 1969, Bogotá Museum of Modern Art and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires in 2000, among others. He also made interdisciplinary works related to architecture, the intervention of public spaces, advertising, environmental and textile design. He won the First Proce Georges Braque, the Grand Prix of Honor of the National Hall of Arts and the First Salon ESSO Award, among other distinctions. In 2015 the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires (MALBA) made a retrospective exhibition of his works.

His work is included in public and private collections including the Museum of Latin American Art (MALBA), the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art (MAMBA) and Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires (MACBA), Argentina; the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, the Blanton Museum of Austin and Lowe Art Museum in Miami, USA; the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art and the Art Collection of the Bank of the Republic of Bogotá, Colombia and the Museum of Fine Art Caracas, Venezuela, among many others.

Edgardo Giménez (1942) was born in Santa Fe, Argentina. He is a self-taught artist, that began working in advertising graphics. In painting and sculpture he has had multiple group, solo and retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Art Tigre(2018), National Museum of Fines Arts of Neuquén (2016), National Museuem of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires (1997) and at the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (1987), among others.

As a graphic designer he participated in projects in Japan, U.S.A., France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, among other countries. In 1987 he participated in the exhibition “The Most Beautiful Posters in the World” at the Grand Palais in Paris, sponsored by UNESCO.

In Architecture he has made the following works: “Casa Azul” (1970-72), exhibited at the MoMA in New York, U.S.A. in the exhibition “Transformations in Modern Architecture” (1979); “Casa Colorada” (1976); “Yellow House” (1979-1981); “White House Buenos Aires Province” and “House of the Golden Columns” (1987), Belgrano, C.A.B.A. In 1985 he won the Silver Pencil Award at the Design Biennial. He made the following books: “Romero Brest: Culture as Provocation” (2006), “Edgardo Giménez; Art and Politics ”(2007)“ Edgardo Giménez, Autobiography, Carne Valiente ”(2016).

He served as art director of the San Martín Theater (1980/83), with national and foreign distinctions. He made the graphic and institutional image of the Teatro Colón (1983-1984) and in 1997 he obtained the Leonardo Prize of the MNBA. Furthermore, He was in charge of the direction of visual communication for the Secretary of Culture of the GABA (2000-2006).

His works are in the following collections, museums and foundations: Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (MAMBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina; National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina; Rosario Museum of Contemporary Art (MACRO), Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina; Federico Jorge Klemm Foundation, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Amalia Lacroze Fortabat Art Collection, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Ignacio Pirovano Collection, Permanent Argentine Art Casa Rosada, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Espigas Foundation, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, U.S.A .; The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), New York, U.S.A .; Library of Congress, Washington, U.S.A .; Nasher Museum of Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, U.S.A .; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A .; Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, California, U.S.A .; Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, U.S.A .; Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, U.S.A .; Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, U.S.A .; El Museo del Barrio, New York, New York, U.S.A .; Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.A .; Museum of Contemporary Art Chile, Santiago, Chile; Narodowe Museum, Poland; and in important private collections.

Jorge Luis de la Vega (Buenos Aires, 1930 – Buenos Aires, 1971) was an Argentine self-taught artist. He was a draftsman, engraver, poet, graphic de- signer and creative in advertising agencies. He worked as a teacher at the University of Buenos Aires and at Cornell University. He integrated the artistic movement called “Nueva figuración” and was close to the Instituto Di Tella that at that time was preceded by Jorge Romero Brest, and where he exhibited individually in 1967.

Between 1963 and 1966 he made his series of “Monsters”.
In 1965 he won a scholarship to travel to the United States. There he built close ties with the language of American Pop. At that time he exhibited regularly in New York, Pittsburgh, Madrid, Toronto and Buenos Aires.
In 1966 he won the Special Prize for Argentine Painter at the Latin American Art Biennial of Córdoba. In 1969 he participated in the Biennial of San Pablo (Brazil).

His works can be found in important private collections and Museums such as: the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA); the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston (MFAH); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York; Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art (RISD); the Blanton Museum of Art in Texas; the Museum of Modern Art of Río de Janeiro (MAM Río), the La- tin American Museum of Buenos Aires (Malba), the Museum of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires (MNBA); the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (MAMBA); among others.

Edgardo Antonio Vigo (La Plata, Argentina, 1928-1997) studied at the School of Fine Arts of the University of La Plata. He worked in the Judicial Power of the Province of Buenos Aires between 1950 and 1991.
In 1953 he received a scholarship and traveled to France where he was in contact with the international art scene. Back in Argentina he began to work on his “useless objects”. In 1955 he founded the Standard’55 group with Gigli and Guereña and started working on his first mathematical Poems. In 1956 he founded the Relativuzgir’s movement and in 1957 he exhibited his “useless machines” in the Judicial Branch Association.
Between 1958 and 1960 he published the WC magazine together with Gigli, Guereña and Comas, as well as the three issues of DRKW’60 of his exclusive authorship. In 1961 he participated in an exhibition invited by Grupo Sí. In 1962 he founded the Diagonal Cero magazine (28 issues until 1968) broadcasting experimental poetry focused on the diffusion of the Diagonal Zero movement that he integrated with Pazos, Gutiérrez and Ginzburg. In 1968 he published the manifesto Un arte a realizar, which he defined as: “a touchable, pointing, expanding, playful, participatory, absurd and contradictory art”.
From 1968 to 1992 he made a series of actions on the public highway called “Señalamientos”, which tended to create a disorder in the daily order. “Bundle of Semaphores” is one of his most recognized actions.
In 1968 he also made the inedible mathematical Poems enclosing some mysterious object in two tuna cans welded together. In Paris he edited his Baroque Mathematical Poems that allowed the public to compose their own poems by manipulating a set of colored planes. He also founded the Museum of Xylography, a traveling institution that consisted of boxes of works ready to be mounted and displayed. In 1969 he presented the film White on White: Homage to Kasimir Malevich, projected behind the public’s back; organizes the International Exhibition of New Poetry at the Di Tella Institute of Buenos Aires and edited Obras (in) completas, a set of labels that the receptor can attach to any object transforming it into a visual poem.
Between 1971 and 1975 he published the Hexágono’71 journal, dedicated to experimental theory and poetry. In 1975 he organized the last art-mail exhibition together with Horacio Zabala. He also participated in some of the activities organized by the CAyC, such as the Art of Systems exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, in 1971. In 1976, with the arrival of the military dictatorship in Argentina and the forced disappearance of his son , the work of Vigo acquired a political aspect and the art-mail circuit was its vehicle to spread the atrocities committed during the de facto regime.
From 1980 onwards he devoted himself mainly to the production of mail art, actions, objects and woodcuts. Proletarian Chess (1983-87) belongs to this period. Together with Graciela Gutiérrez, Marx forms the collective G.E.Marx-Vigo, which works together for seven years.
In 1991, a retrospective of his work was held at the San Telmo Foundation in Buenos Aires. In 1994, he integrated the Argentine shipment to the XXII Biennial of San Pablo (Brazil), along with Pablo Suárez and Libero Badii and made the 1954-1994 exhibition at the Visual Arts Foundation of La Plata. In 1997 he opened the solo exhibition at the Institute of Ibero-American Cooperation (Spanish Cultural Center of Buenos Aires) and formed the Argentine selection of artists who participated in the 1st Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre (Brazil).
In 2003, an anthological exhibition of his work was held at the Fundación Telefónica de Buenos Aires. In 2008, machinations were inaugurated. Edgardo Antonio Vigo: Works 1953-1962 at the Cultural Center of Spain in Buenos Aires, which was then presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rosario and the Provincial Museum of Fine Arts of La Plata.
In 2016 the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (MAMBA) performs Edgardo Antonio Vigo, permanent factory of creative chaos, Obras 1953 – 1997, an exhaustive retrospective of his work.

Gyula Kosice (1924) was born in Kosice, Slovakia. nationalized argentinian. He was a sculptor, painter and poet, and noted for being one of the forerunners of kinetic vanguard art. Interested in sculptural research, he made light experiences, integrating kinetic elements and introducing water and plexiglass in his works. Kosice was co-founder of Arte Concreto Invención in 1945, and a year later, founder of the Madí Art Movement, author of his Manifesto. He was also co-founder of Arturo magazine in 1944, and propeller of the “Hidro-Space City”, a project of a future urbanism suspended in space. Throughout his career he published 15 books of essays and poetry.

He made numerous individual exhibitions and more than 500 collective exhibitions. He has been distinguished with the degree of “Knight of Arts and Letters” by the government of France in 1989, and in 1991 the National Museum of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires made a retrospective exhibition of his work.

He received numerous awards, such as the Prize for the Trajectory of Plastic Arts granted by the National Museum of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires in 1994, the Di Tella Prize and the Konex Prize in 1997, among others.

His work is included in public and private collections such as the Museum of Latin American Art (MALBA), the National Museum of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (MAMBA) and Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires (MACBA) ), Argentina; Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, Amalia Lacroze Art Collection From Fortabat, the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston, the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA), USA; the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, France, among many others.

Juan Nicolás Melé (1923 – 2012) was an Argentine artist. At the age of 11 he began studying drawing and painting with Enrique Rodríguez. He began his education at the School of Fine Arts “Manuel Belgrano” (with his friends also artists Gregorio Vardanega and Tomás Maldonado) and then at the National School of Fine Arts “Prilidiano Pueyrredon”.

After finishing his studies, he comes in contact with the Arte Concreto Invencion association formed by Alfredo Hlito, Lidy Prati, Manuel Espinosa, Enio Iommi, the Lozza brothers, Tomás Maldonado, Alberto Molenberg, Claudio Girola, Jorge Souza, Antonio Caraduje, Oscar Nunez, Virgilio Villalba y Contreras, with whom he participates in the group’s third exhibition, in October 1946.

The French government gives him a scholarship, with which he attends L’École du Louvre between 1948 and 1949. He exhibits in Italy, where he comes into contact with the members of the Béton group in Milan. In Switzerland he comes in contact with Max Bill and, in Paris, with Michel Seuphor.

In 1950, back in Argentina, he continues to work in art as a teacher of History of the Arts at the National School of Fine Arts. In 1955 he is co-founder of the Arte Nuevo group, led by Aldo Pellegrini and Carmelo Arden-Quin and counting among its members Martha Boto, Simona Ertan, Eduardo Jonquieres and Gregorio Vardanega.

In 1974 he moved to New York where he worked and exhibited in the Gallery of Caïman (1978) and in the Arc Gallery (1983 – 1985). In 1981 he exhibited at the “Eduardo Sívori” Museum in Buenos Aires. In 1986, he returned to Argentina and a year later he organized an individual exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

He received the Alberto J. Trabucco prize in 1997, awarded by the National Academy of Fine Arts. Edit a book with his memoirs, La avant-garde of ‘40. Memories of a concrete artist, published in 1999.

He died of on 2012, at eighty-eight years of age.