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(b Panama City, Nov 6, 1943).

Panamanian painter. He studied painting from 1960 to 1962 at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Panama City and from 1964 to 1970 at the Universidad Autónoma, Mexico. From 1971 he taught at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Panama City, of which he was director from 1980 to 1982. Under the influence of Pop art he produced semi-abstract paintings that combined geometric shapes and lines with sensuous parts of human anatomy painted with an airbrush and set in vaporous spaces of flowing colors. A typical example is Profiles of Attraction (1976; Panama City, Mus. A. Contemp.). In later works such as Attack II (1987; Panama City, Mus. A. Contemp.) he added expressionist brushstrokes for visual contrast.

(b Acapulco, Jan 5, 1948).

Mexican mixed-media and installation artist. He studied industrial design at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, and continued with graduate studies at the School of Arts and Design in London. The artistic trajectory of Aguirre shows different stages characterized by the obsessive, post-conceptual search for new elements of the visual language. In the beginning his work was involved with documentary materials referring to national historical events in Mexico (1978–1987). Later on he was involved through successive phases with significant objects and images integrated in flawless ephemeral installations to articulate critical discourses of current social and environmental reality (1988–1998). In the subsequent twenty years he was dedicated to an analytical and critical work of written language in the media (1998–2017).

Attentive to the materials and the nature of objects as the center of acute semiotics, Aguirre constructed with impeccable treatment, synthetic visual sets full of physical and significant tensions. Metal, plastic, wood, organic materials, bones, photographs, ashes, tools, various objects, cables, presses, logs, machetes, and axes are recurrent elements in his language. With them he referred to relations of power and inequality, depredations and submission, violence and fears....

(b Panama City, Sept 5, 1949).

Panamian painter. A graduate of the University of Panama’s Architecture School, he became a full-time painter following his first solo exhibition in 1979. From 1980 to 1983 he studied at the Art Students League in New York, his only formal training as an artist. Alfaro is best known for his beautifully rendered oil paintings but has also produced drawings, pastels, and three-dimensional pieces. His first images were portraits of young women surrounded by surreal elements or in dream settings. From 1983 he painted humorous images of traditional or religious subjects such as church processions, as well as portraits of imaginary ecclesiastical figures and war heroes; capitalizing on Panama’s strong Catholic tradition. Alfaro even invented his own saints, including the Virgin of All Secrets (1986; see color pl. I, fig.). By 1990, his compositions became increasingly baroque, crowded with human figures in often menacing natural environments that suggest abundant iconographic, literary, and historical interpretations. Towards the end of the decade, Alfaro began to isolate and increasingly distort his models, achieving an expressive deformation characteristic of his disturbing view of humanity and personal vision of surrealism. After ...

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 Antwerp, Aug 22, 1959).

Belgian-born interdisciplinary artist, active in Mexico. He studied architecture at the Institut d’Architecture de Tournai in Belgium (1978–83) and at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice (1983–6). Alÿs moved to Mexico in 1987 and his art practice initially concentrated on Mexico City as a laboratory of urban living, often documented in the form of evocative, conceptually layered photographs, sculptures, and videos. In the slide series Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling) (1992–2002), Alÿs photographed street vendors and workers as they passed by carting a wide variety of goods within a ten-block vicinity of his studio. For his project entitled The Liar, The Copy of the Liar (1997) Alÿs created small images of suited men inspired by the commercial sign painters of Mexico City, and subsequently commissioned from them larger versions in their own styles. In this process Alÿs deferred authorship into a semantic chain. Hovering between the banal and the surreal, these works have an uncanny theme, of individuals observed in situations that defy explanation....

(b São Paulo, 1935; d São Paulo, 2015).

Brazilian painter and printmaker. After studying engraving in São Paulo, he moved to New York in 1959 to complete his studies at the Pratt Graphic Center, where his contact with international Pop art merged with his own interest in Brazilian popular imagery, for example in the portfolio of woodcuts Mine and Yours (1967). Immediately afterwards he began painting ambiguous and ironic still lifes collectively titled Brasíliana, which use bananas as symbols of underdevelopment and exploitation, for example BR-1 SP (1970; São Paulo, Pin. Estado) and Bananas (1971; Washington, DC, Mus. Mod. A. Latin America). In 1971 he won a trip abroad in the National Salon of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro), which took him again to New York between 1972 and 1973. On his return to São Paulo he began the series Battlegrounds, in which he submitted the previously reclining bananas to slashing, torture, and putrefaction. Subsequently, shapes were reorganized into configurations of an undramatic Surrealism, playful, colorful, tumescent, and as firmly rooted as ever in his native Brazil and Latin America....

(b Mexico City, 1970).

Mexican installation artist, video artist, and performance artist. Amorales studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, after attending Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (1996–1997), both in Amsterdam. He worked with images and signs of different types that when modified, combined, and recoded produce new images and meanings in turn. Based on pre-existing information and images he found on the Internet, Amorales created a particular way of working, more closely resembling that of a design studio than a traditional artist’s atelier. In his workspace and with a team of assistants, he proposed different ways of understanding the forms in which signs circulate and are appropriated, inquiring into notions of authorship, communication, and artistic media. From 1998 Amorales collected images from the Internet and converterted them into black, white, and red vectors. This collection is now known as the Liquid Archive. With these images, he produced several artworks in which multiplicity, repetition, and juxtaposition are constant. For example, in the video ...

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 Barquisimeto, 1969).

Venezuelan photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist. He studied photography with Ricardo Armas (b 1952) from 1987 to 1988, and art history at the Universidad Central de Venezuela Caracas from 1987 to 1990. His art reveals the contradictions and fallacies of modernism, often explored through themes related to architecture and urban planning, as well as gender and identity. Much of Apostól’s work focused on his native Venezuela, and more particularly, on the city of Caracas and its citizens. However, the artist also produced works related to the cities of Bogotá, Los Angeles, and Madrid, where he was long based. Significantly, although his art conveys local particularities, it also bears wider implications about the legacy of modernism across the globe.

Much of Apóstol’s photographic practice involved the use of digital technology. By erasing, altering, or enhancing a photograph, he exposed the failures of modernism as embedded within Venezuelan architecture. Turning to the vernacular buildings of Caracas, his series ...

(b Santiago, 1967).

Chilean architect. Aravena received his architecture degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1992 and in 1994 established Aravena Arquitectos, an independent architecture studio where he took private commissions while teaching at his own school in Santiago and at Harvard University. In 2001 Aravena launched ELEMENTAL, described as a “do tank” focusing on projects of public interest and social impact. Their notions of incrementalism and participation introduce an important variable to the design of buildings: a dynamic hierarchical redistribution between the designer and people, both of whom are conceived as producers of their own habitable space. While Aravena continued to occupy a central position on the design (and construction) of buildings, people were not passive receivers but active producers of the houses where they live. Aravena’s most valuable contribution to low-income housing architecture thus has been the gap he left empty for people to complete.

Working within a governmental framework created in ...

(b Caracas, 1952).

Venezuelan photographer. He was self-taught and dedicated himself to photography from 1972, first working for the magazine Escena (1974–1976) and then for the Galería de Arte Nacional in Caracas (1976–1978). His first exhibition, Acercamiento a Zitman, was held at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber, Caracas, in ...

American architectural firm incorporated in 1977 by Bernardo Fort-Brescia (b Lima, Peru, 19 Nov 1950), Laurinda Hope Spear (b Rochester, MN, 23 Aug 1950), Hervin Romney (b Havana, Cuba, 9 Feb 1941), Andres Duany (b New York, 7 Sept 1949), and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (b Bryn Mawr, PA, 10 Dec 1950). The latter two members of the firm left in 1980 to start their own practice, as did Romney, in 1984. Arquitectonica’s modernism was youthful, unpredictable, and slightly rebellious, and essentially displaced the polemical and elitist high modern with a populist, chic, and jazzy modernism. The firm continued the colourism of Miami’s ‘tropical art deco’, but its roots remained in the Latin culture of Peru, Cuba, and Miami: ultimately their commercially hot architecture called to mind the non-academic character of Pop art, the non-conformity and pizzazz of youth, and the cultural flare and brassy musicality of Brazil 66, Tijuana Brass, and the Miami Sound Machine....

Set of financial methods, instruments, and business models that are used in the Art market. Important developments since the 1960s include the spreading availability and use of art price information and price indexes (see Art index), the emergence of loans collateralized by artworks, repeated efforts to create art investment structures, and a strong growth in art market advisory services provided by wealth managers and new entrepreneurs (see also Investment).

The first major development has been the spread of art price information and art price indexes over the last half-century. After a few difficult decades, art price levels and public interest in the art market were going up again in the 1950s and 1960s. A number of books on the history of the art market and on art investment that were published around that time—Le Vie Etrange des Objets (1959) by Maurice Rheims, Art as an Investment...

(b Mexico City, Apr 25, 1944, d Mexico City, Apr 4, 2003).

Mexican photographer. She studied art at the Universidad Motolinía and at the Universidad Anáhuac, both in Mexico City, and undertook specialist studies at the Club Fotográfico de México. Ascher’s work showed the influence of such photographers as Yousuf Karsh, Sam Haskins (1926–2009), and Richard Avedon, but it was also more generally stimulated by the work of Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She made frequent trips to New York, where she acquired experience from photographers and artists that not only enriched her own visual concepts but also the technical aspects of her work. Ascher consolidated her position in Mexican photography through her work, particularly in the acute sensitivity of her many portraits of personalities from the artistic and cultural world. Her series of José Luis Cuevas and Juan Rulfo are among her most outstanding works. After several years of work she collected the material that was published as ...

(b Caracas, 1964).

Venezuelan painter. Between 1982 and 1986, she studied at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. After initial forays into Neo-Expressionism, her work shifted toward abstraction, inflected by her religious beliefs and spirituality. From 1986 through 2002 she was a devotee of Hare Krishna, and in 2012 she began to practice Nichiren Buddhism. Azcárate often produced works as part of a concentrated series, and her art reflects a philosophic and mantra-like methodology through the use of pattern and repetition. The richly symbolic shape of the circle is a recurring motif, as is the use of untraditional materials.

In the 1990s Azcárate used curvilinear lines, repeated marks, or the daubs created by her fingerprints to create abstract compositions that extended across the surface of her canvases. In 1997, after a trip to India, she began using cow dung as a primary source of material. Praising its purity, the artist created paintings from the stains left by the organic matter after it dried. She collected and shaped dung to create patterns and circular forms on her canvases, later using these dehydrated discs to create sculptural pieces that reference the form of a rosary, evoking the Catholic faith in which she had been raised. In ...

(Francisca )

(b East Los Angeles, CA, Sept 20, 1946).

American muralist, activist and teacher. Born to Mexican–American parents, Baca is recognized as one of the leading muralists in the USA. She was involved from a young age in activism, including the Chicano Movement, the antiwar protest and Women’s Liberation. She studied art at California State University, Northridge, where she received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. Baca started teaching art in 1970 in East Los Angeles for the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks and became interested in the ways murals could involve youth, allowing them to express their experiences. She founded the City of Los Angeles Mural Program in 1974, which evolved into the Social and Public Resource Center, a community arts organization, where she served as artistic director. She held five summer mural workshops from 1976 through 1983 for teenagers and community artists to help her paint a huge mural on the ethnic history of Los Angeles, called the ...

(b Maracaibo, Feb 4, 1945; d Caracas, Apr 9, 2003).

Venezuelan painter and performance artist. He studied painting at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Maracaibo from 1957 to 1960. In 1963 he founded, among fellow artists and poets, the visual arts and literary group Grupo Vertical 9. In the same year, along with fellow painters and sculptors from the group, Barboza had his first exhibition in the Consejo Municipal de Maracaibo. Around that time, he moved to Caracas and studied with Jacobo Borges at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Cristóbal Rojas, where he immersed himself in the artistic life of the capital and became a member of Círculo Pez Dorado, an experimental group of Venezuelan neo-figuration artists. In 1967–1968, Barboza responded to Pop art and began incorporating psychedelic colors into his work. The assemblage, Miss Garbo (1968), which won the Henrique Otero Vizcarrondo Award of the XXIX Annual Official Salon of Venezuelan Art, is exemplary of this period. Mixing painting and sculpture, the work consists of a vibrantly colored, wooden torso of a female body that was shaped as an armoire and whose drawers, containing little objects that alluded to the Hollywood diva, could be manipulated at will by the spectator. In ...

(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 San Marcos, Jan 1, 1946).

Guatemalan painter and printmaker. He began his art studies at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Guatemala City, then studied painting at the Facultad de Bellas Artes of the Universidad de Costa Rica (1968–1969) and printmaking at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid (1974–1975). His first works were expressionist woodcuts influenced by Munch, but after studying in Madrid he changed his style, emphasizing the role of drawing and texture and taking his subjects from Latin American literature.

On his return to Guatemala in 1979, Barrios addressed himself to the magic realism that held sway there in literature as well as in the visual arts. From c. 1980 he devoted himself increasingly to watercolor (e.g. Bosch’s Garden, Guatemala City, Mus. A. Contemp.) and to oil painting. His brother César Barrios (b 1945) was also active as a painter and printmaker....

(b São Paulo, Jun 20, 1914; d São Paulo, Dec 22, 2010).

Brazilian visual artist and designer. The formal training Barsotti received was in drawing and chemistry, and by the 1950s he had established a professional career in design, working in São Paulo during the postwar period. From 1954 to 1964 he ran a studio with Willys de Castro (1926–1988), a life-long collaborator and fellow artist, called Estúdio de Projetos Gráficos, where he created costume design, graphic design, and textile design, among other things. During this period he focused his artistic efforts exclusively on geometric abstraction, then the dominant style of the avant-garde in Brazil under the rubric of Concrete art. However, Barsotti did not immediately affiliate with any of the groups that promoted it, such as the dogmatic Grupo Ruptura in São Paulo. He was not, strictly speaking, a devotee of Concrete art, which required that the geometric composition be entirely preconceived, divorced from observed reality, and visually represent a mathematical formula. On this matter, de Castro applauded his friend in a ...