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(b Turmero, nr. Maracay, Aug 22, 1919; d Caracas, Feb 20, 1993).

Venezuelan painter and sculptor. From humble origins, Abreu was raised by his godmother Amelia Borges, who was very attached to magical rituals and religion. This experience would influence him deeply in his artistic practice. Abreu had to work from a very young age, mostly as a clerk in a grocery store where he began to develop a sensibility for the aesthetics of objects and organization. He moved to Caracas in 1938 and continued working while he attended night school and finished his primary education. He also attended classes at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas in Caracas, studying under Pedro Ángel Gonzáles, Vicente Fabianni, Francisco Narváez, and Marcos Castillo. In 1942 he obtained a scholarship that enabled him to go to day class and graduated in 1947 as painter.

Among Abreu’s classmates were members of a novel generation that would became renowned artists including Carlos Cruz-Diez, Pascual Navarro (1923–1986), Mateo Manaure, and Alejandro Otero, who would mostly dedicate their practice to abstraction. However, Abreu maintained a personal language marked by a search for the transcendent in the figure. In 1948 he was a founder-member of the Taller Libre de Arte, an independent group of young and talented artists that experimented in Cubist, Surrealist, Expressionist, and figurative trends....

(b Nov 30, 1892; d Sept 27, 1967).

Chilean sculptor. From 1902 to 1939 he lived in Germany; he studied under Franz Metzner in Berlin. On his return to Chile, he taught at a private school and then taught sculpture in the Academia Particular of the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, also executing important works such as the tomb of President Pedro Aguirre Cerda (1941; Cementerio General de Santiago) and a large relief, La naturaleza, in Parque Cousiño (1945; Santiago, Escuela Jard. Parque Cousiño).

Albert’s training in Germany, when Expressionism was at its height, led him to use distortion of form as the sign of vehement emotion. In his Ariel and Caliban (bronze, h. 8 m, 1960; Santiago, Parque Forestal), limbs are lengthened, muscles swell, tendons are visible beneath the skin, and one body yields and droops while the other rises imposingly into space. These traits are found in all his other sculptures, with the stress on subjectivity impelling him towards the metaphysical notion that the “real” materials with which he works are his own feelings. Yet there is also a meditative depth in his work and a calming effect arising from an idealized geometry of forms. Albert’s concern with mass, which brought out the sensual qualities of his materials, was part of a profound examination of the specific problems of sculptural language: rhythm, movement, and tension of surfaces....

(b Marseille; d after 1912).

Italian sculptor and teacher, active in France and Mexico. He began his career in Marseille as a sculptor of the French school, and in 1888 he received an honorable mention at the Salon des Artistes Français, where he exhibited regularly until 1913. He probably moved to Mexico at the end of 1889. He won critical acclaim for his first works there, marble and bronze busts of important Mexican figures. In 1891 the government commissioned him to create statues of national heroes and dignitaries for the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City; the statue of Col. Miguel López was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, IL, in 1893 and at the World’s Fair in Atlanta, GA, in 1895, winning prizes on both occasions. This was Alciati’s most dramatic and realist work, and the influence of Rodin is clear. In 1895 he was appointed professor of sculpture, decoration, and modeling at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City. At the turn of the century he was commissioned to create, under the direction of ...

American installation artists, active also in Puerto Rico. Jennifer Allora (b Philadelphia, Mar 20, 1974) graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art from the University of Richmond, Virginia (1996), and Guillermo Calzadilla (b Havana, Cuba, Jan 10, 1971) graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Escuela de Artes Plastica in San Juan, Puerto Rico (1996). Allora and Calzadilla met in Italy in 1995 during a study abroad program in Florence. They then lived together in San Juan for a year before moving to New York City where they started working collaboratively while each participated in different residency and study programs. In 1998–1999, Allora participated in the year-long Whitney Independent Study Program, while Calzadilla participated in the P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center National Studio Program.

Allora & Calzadilla’s first important international exhibition was the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo in 1998 curated by Paulo Herkenhoff, which investigated the idea of cultural cannibalism known in Brazilian literature as ...

(b Quito, Sept 10, 1913; d Quito, Apr 11, 1990).

Ecuadorean sculptor and engraver. He studied sculpture at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Quito, graduating in 1932. He was a pupil of Luigi Cassadio (fl. 1915–1933), an Italian sculptor who stimulated sculptural activity in the school and whom Andrade succeeded as professor. With his Mother Earth (Quito, Mus. Mun. Alberto Mena Caamaño), Andrade won the Mariano Aguilera national prize in 1940. His early work was realist and academic, but in 1941 he studied mural composition with the Ecuadorean artist Camilo Egas at the New School for Social Research in New York. His previous low reliefs in stone and wood were transformed into vast murals depicting stylized and geometric human scenes (e.g. the untitled mural, 18×9 m, at the Universidad Central del Ecuador in Quito, 1949–1954). In the late 1960s he used hammered steel sheeting in his sculptures, and in the 1970s he executed what he called his “flying sculptures” (e.g. ...

American performance artist and sculptor. Antoni studied sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Antoni drew attention to herself in 1993 during a performance (Loving Care) at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London where, dressed in a black catsuit, she dipped her long hair repeatedly into a bucket filled with hair dye, and using her hair as a paint brush, mopped the gallery floor on her hands and knees. Her performance was reminiscent of Yves Klein’s 1960s ...

(b Chilibre, Jan 16, 1929).

Panamanian sculptor and painter. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence (1949–1954) and at the Real Academia Catalana de Bellas Artes de San Jorge in Barcelona (1955–1960). On his return to Panama City he became the first professor of sculpture at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas from 1961 to 1964, and in 1964 he founded the Casa de la Escultura, a government-supported center for the teaching and promotion of the fine arts which he continued to direct after it was renamed the Centro de Arte y Cultura. Arboleda exhibited often and established his reputation as a young man with academic works such as Serenity (marble, 1950; Panama City, Mus. A. Contemp.). Most of his work was figurative, but he later developed a more symbolic style and produced his most original sculptures on indigenous themes, as with the bronze head of a Chocó Indian entitled ...

(b Burgos, 1526–7; d Mexico City, 1593).

Mexican architect and sculptor of Spanish birth. In 1541 he moved from his native city to Madrid, where he served as an apprentice to Luis de Vega, one of the architects working in the High Renaissance style for Emperor Charles V. Arciniega worked with Vega in the remodelling of the Alcázar at Madrid. At intervals between 1542 and 1548 he worked under the direction of Rodrigo Gil de Hontañón as a sculptor on the Plateresque façade of the university at Alcalá de Henares. He was possibly also responsible for the main retable in the church of Santiago at Guadalajara.

In 1554 Arciniega arrived in New Spain (now Mexico) with his brother Luis de Arciniega (1537–99), who was also an architect. He settled in Puebla de los Angeles (now Puebla) and worked there between 1554 and 1558, primarily engaged in a large number of public works as master mason. He established his reputation with the fountain that he constructed (...

(b Hacienda de San Juan Bautista, Durango, Mar 15, 1890; d Mexico City, Dec 21, 1965).

Mexican sculptor. He served in the Mexican Revolution before enrolling in the Academia de S. Carlos, continuing his studies from 1919 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. On his return to Mexico in 1921, he began a fruitful career as teacher and artist, applying an academic naturalism to official public monuments of nationalist inspiration such as monument to the Fatherland (1924; Mexico City, Mus. N. Hist.). His most ambitious works relating to the revolution are the monument to Obregón (1933; Mexico City, Avenida Insurgentes), Proletarian Family (1934; Mexico City, Inst. Poli. N.), and the monument to Francisco Villa (1957; Chihuahua, Avenida División del Norte). He also treated other subjects, such as female nudes and portraits, sometimes in wood or cast bronze, which contain reference to Pre-Columbian art. Essentially he was an artist resistant to change, a staunch and honorable traditionalist.

(b Arezzo, Feb 2, 1916; d Buenos Aires, Feb 11, 2001).

Argentine sculptor, painter, printmaker, and draftsman of Italian birth. After completing his studies at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires in 1945, he went on study trips around Latin America (1945–1946) and Europe (1949). He became a naturalized citizen of Argentina in 1947 and from 1949 he participated in the Salones Nacionales, winning various awards. He soon won a reputation as one of Argentina’s most outstanding sculptors, working in marble, bronze, wood, cement, and clay. Torrent (marble, 1953; Buenos Aires, Mus. N. B.A.), a semi-abstract female nude composed of smooth curved planes, typifies one aspect of his work: his treatment of themes of fecundity, motherhood, and the family, using rounded forms to which he attached a symbolic value. The titles associated with some of these material forms, such as Time (bronze, 1959; Buenos Aires, Mus. A. Mod.), indicate the way they are meant to be read....

(b Zamora, c. 1680; d Mexico City, 1748).

Spanish architect and sculptor, active in Mexico. Between 1702 and 1703 he worked in Madrid as a designer of stage machinery, later moving to Andalusia, where he produced the principal altar of the sacristy of Seville Cathedral in the Rococo style, completed in 1709 (destr. 1824). Ceán Bermúdez described it as having ‘four large estípites, pilasters, lots of angels prankishly tumbling about and a cornice broken and interrupted in a thousand places with tortuous projections and recessions, the whole topped by a huge arch’. In 1714 Balbás also carried out the plan for the choir-stalls of the church of S Juan in Marchena, carved by Juan de Valencia, equally playful in style and similarly using estípites. The same year he designed the lectern in the same church, though this was not constructed until 1735.

Around 1718 Balbás went to Mexico City to take charge of the ‘retablo del Perdón’ in the Chapel of the Kings at the Metropolitan Cathedral, using the ...

(b Cartagena, Oct 27, 1945).

Colombian painter, sculptor, and conceptual artist. He studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes of the University of Atlántico in Barranquilla, Colombia, from 1958 to 1960, and in Italy from 1966 to 1967 at the University of Perugia. In 1966, under the influence of Pop art, he made the first of a series of collages combining cut-outs of well-known individuals and comic strips with drawn elements. Two years later he added frosty effects and velvet flowers to his interpretations in black and red ink of figures with distorted bodies and the faces of film stars. In 1969 he began to present these in increasingly three-dimensional boxes or glass cases, accompanied by clouds of cotton wool, plastic figures, and other additions that combined to make up fantastic or nostalgic scenes, dream-like and surrealist in appearance and tone.

Barrios was among those who introduced conceptual art to Colombia, for example by publishing in newspapers a series of ...

(b Torroella de Montgri, Catalonia, Mar 3, 1911; d Buenos Aires, Oct 8, 1966).

Argentine painter, printmaker, illustrator, sculptor, and stage designer of Spanish Catalan birth. He arrived in Buenos Aires in 1913. Although his uncle, José Planas Casas (b Catalonia, 1900; d Argentina, 1960), taught him the rudiments of art, he was basically self-taught and began to exhibit his work in 1934. Synthesizing ideas from Zen philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the theories on cosmic energy espoused by the Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Reich with his interests in automatism, poetry, and painting, he found a creative sense of direction from an early age. He applied his methods not only to paintings but to stage designs, illustrations, collages, prints, polychrome sculptures, and boxlike constructions; as a painter he worked both in tempera and in oil, and he also produced seventy-two murals.

In 1936 Batlle Planas inaugurated a Surrealist phase with a series entitled Paranoiac X-rays, followed by another group of pictures, Tibetan Series, populated by spectral figures related to works by Yves Tanguy. Between ...

(b Buenos Aires, Aug 7, 1947).

Argentine sculptor and architect. After studying architecture he began in 1967 to make multiple color projections of shadows, continuing in 1968 to work with light apparatuses. He then traveled on a French Government scholarship to Paris, where he began to create multiple superimposed images using acrylic shapes laid on top of flat mirrors. He became involved with the Groupe d’Art Constructif et Mouvement and turned to spheres within cubes or other spheres. After this he experimented with inflatable sculptures and back projections of photographs, and later with Books (e.g. Summa geometrica, 1979, see Glusberg 1985, 133) and Megacubes, which consist generally of ruins or landscapes rendered unfamiliar. As an architect he worked on the Recoleta Cultural Center (1972–1979; with Clorindo Testa and Luis Benedit) in Buenos Aires. He was a founder-member of Grupo CAYC.

(b Calgary, Dec 9, 1930; d Mexico City, Jul 12, 1992).

Canadian painter, draftsman, and sculptor, active in Mexico. After studying in Canada at the Vancouver School of Art (1944–1945) and Banff School of Fine Arts (1947–1948) he moved to Mexico City, where he continued his training at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura La Esmeralda (1948–1949) and from 1950 worked as one of a team of assistants to David Alfaro Siqueiros. He began soon after to produce murals, such as The People Don’t Want War (acrylic, 2×2.5 m, 1952; Mexico City, Inst. Poli. N.) and Scenes from Don Quixote (acrylic on concrete, 1957; Cuernavaca), following these with many others in Mexico, the USA, Canada, Cuba, and Nicaragua. He was also prolific as a draftsman and easel painter, often working on a large scale, and to a lesser extent as a sculptor. Working in an Expressionist style and concentrating his attention on the human figure—sometimes contorted, flayed, or treated in a robot-like manner—he treated biblical themes as well as more contemporary subjects such as the victims of Nazism or of the bombing of Hiroshima. In ...

(Fernando)

(b Buenos Aires, Jul 12, 1937; d Buenos Aires, Apr 12, 2011).

Argentine sculptor, painter, and architect. As an artist he was self-taught. Making reference to biological and chemical experiments to construct metaphors of the relationships between science and art, he began in 1968 to analyze the role of the individual in society through his first Animal Habitat, consisting of glass objects with water and fish, and Microzoos of ants, lizards, fish, tortoises, vegetables, and honeycombs. At the Venice Biennale in 1970 he showed The Biotron (see Glusberg 1985, 142), a cage for bees containing an artificial meadowland with twenty-four flowers that supplied a sugary solution; the bees could choose between the artificial device and the gardens that surrounded the Biennale. In later works he designed mazes for rats, ants, cockroaches, and fish, as well as contraptions displaying the behavior of plants (e.g. Fitotron, 1972, see Glusberg 1985, 141), not to encourage scientific observation but to suggest to the spectator possible applications of the experiment....

(b Caracas, Aug 4, 1930).

Venezuelan sculptor and museum founder. Bermúdez studied at the School of Visual and Applied Arts of Caracas between 1944 and 1946. Jesús Soto and Ernest Maragall (1903–1991) were among her professors in that time. In 1947 she moved to Maracaibo where she continued her studies at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas “Julio Árraga” (1948–1950). During the early 1950s she produced stylized figurative paintings derived from Cézanne, but soon she started to paint abstract and flat forms, influenced by Soto, who had been named director of the school in 1947. Her researches in abstraction went together with her inquiries about three-dimensionality and she became a pioneer of abstract sculpture in Venezuela. In 1957 she made her first solo exhibition at the Centro de Bellas Artes de Maracaibo which contained paintings made with lacquer on wood, and some of her first sculptures—open-line hanging structures made of welded iron. In ...

(b Guadalajara, 1852; d Rio de Janeiro, 1931).

Brazilian sculptor. The son of Italian musicians and brother of Chilean-born painter Henrique Bernardelli (1857–1936), he spent his childhood in Mexico and Chile before coming to Brazil with his family. In 1870 he was already enrolled in the course on statuary sculpture in the Academia Imperial das Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, from where he was awarded a trip to Europe in 1876. He remained abroad until 1885, lived briefly in Paris from 1878 to 1879, but stayed mainly in Rome, where he finished his studies with Achille Monteverdi. During that time he executed one of his best-known works, the marble Christ and the Adulteress (1884; Rio de Janeiro, Mus. N. B.A.), which bears witness to the persistence in Brazil of a neoclassically based naturalism throughout the 19th century and beyond. He taught in the Academia Imperial, and when this was renamed the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes with the establishment of the Republic, he became its director from ...

(b Rosario, May 14, 1905; d Buenos Aires, Oct 13, 1981).

Argentine painter, sculptor, and printmaker. He trained at the stained-glass window workshop of Buxadera & Compañía, Rosario, province of Santa Fé, and with Eugenio Fornels and Enrique Munné. He held his first exhibition in 1920. At the age of 20 he won a scholarship for study in Europe awarded by the Jockey Club of Rosario, which enabled him to study in Paris under André Lhote and with Othon Friesz at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. After showing his European works in Buenos Aires in 1927 he obtained another scholarship, this time from the government of the province of Santa Fé, as a result of which he established contact with the Surrealists in 1928; in particular he befriended Louis Aragon and the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre.

Berni returned to Argentina in 1930. In 1933 he established an artistic–literary group, Nuevo Realismo, and began to depict Argentina’s social reality. From the 1960s, through two characters he created (Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel) he began to create works from pieces of metal and wood, buttons, burlap, wires, and other debris gathered by him in the shantytowns surrounding Buenos Aires. Combining in these works commonplace materials and a brutal realism (e.g. ...

(b Barbados, May 26, 1959).

American sculptor and painter. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts (1982) and the Whitney Independent Studies Program, New York (1985). He had his first solo exhibition at Artists Space, New York (1984), and subsequently showed regularly in America and Europe. Bickerton emerged in New York in the early 1980s as part of the group of artists termed ‘Neo-Geo’, along with Jeff Koons, Peter Halley and Meyer Vaisman. Their work was characterized by a rejection of the neo-expressionist trends in painting and, in Bickerton’s case, by the appropriation of images and labels from consumer culture. His use of popular imagery, though most obviously indebted to Pop art, was influenced also by conceptual and Minimal art; because of its critique of consumer society, it has also been termed ‘commodity art’. In the early 1980s Bickerton made paintings on masonite boards that contained single words, such as ‘Susie’ and ‘God’, in extravagantly ornate lettering as ironic reflections that foreshadowed his later criticisms of American society. These developed into the works for which he became known: wall-mounted black containers, riveted together and covered with corporate logos. Labelled either ...