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Article

Allora & Calzadilla  

Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy

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 ...

Article

Alÿs, Francis  

Francis Summers

revised by Martin R. Patrick

(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....

Article

Barboza, Diego  

Cruz Barceló Cedeño

revised by Iliana Cepero

(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 ...

Article

Barradas, Rafael  

Angel Kalenberg

(Pérez)

(b Montevideo, Jan 7, 1890; d Montevideo, Feb 12, 1929).

Uruguayan painter and stage designer. He was encouraged to pursue his interest in art by his father, the Spanish painter Antonio Pérez Barradas (1862–1899), and appears to have been taught drawing by the Spanish artist Vicente Casanova y Ramos (1870–1920). He became involved with the bohemian intellectual life of Montevideo while exhibiting his drawings and working as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines such as La Semana, Bohemia, El Tiempo, La Razón, and Ultima hora in Montevideo and Buenos Aires. In 1913 he founded the publication El Monigote.

At the end of 1914 Barradas settled in Spain, where he began to produce work influenced by the Italian avant-garde art he had seen on his travels through Europe, introducing the avant-garde in Spain. In response to Futurism he painted pictures such as Apartment House (1919), Everything on 65 (1919), and Vibrationist (1918...

Article

Basaldúa, Héctor  

Nelly Perazzo

(b Pergamino, Buenos Aires, Sept 22, 1894; d Buenos Aires, Feb 21, 1976).

Argentine painter, stage designer, and illustrator. He studied drawing in Buenos Aires under the Italian painter Augusto Bolognini (b 1870) and at the Academia Nacional before moving in 1923 to Paris, where he worked in Charles Guérin’s studio and at the Académie Colarossi. He also studied in the studios of André Lhote and Othon Friesz and became associated with other Argentine artists based in Paris. Like others of his generation and nationality, he sought in the 1920s to escape from pictorial provincialism by rejecting academic norms, as in Still Life (1926; Rosario, Mus. Mun. B.A.). He learned how to paint while living in France and developed a range of imagery typical of Argentine art without showing any great originality.

More than any other painter, Basaldúa depicted life in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, concentrating humorously and without sentimentality on the wide boys, dance-hall girls, loose women, and handsome, dangerous men of the tango in such pictures as the ...

Article

Benoit, Rigaud  

Dolores M. Yonker

(b Port-au-Prince, Nov 1, 1911; d Port-au-Prince, Oct 29, 1986).

Haitian painter. A painter of particularly lyrical gifts, he entered the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince as the driver of its jeep, having earlier exercised his talents as a musician and painter of china. He was so shy about his first efforts at panel painting that he attributed them to a friend. He admired Hector Hippolyte’s art while he was courting his daughter, whom he later married. His genre pictures, although anecdotal, are tinged with a subtle mystery. From the beginning, his work was meticulously executed. His polished surfaces, often obtained by repeated overpainting, are reminiscent of medieval manuscript illuminations. Details of faces, hands, and feet are delicate but expressive and individualistic. Scenes of everyday events or of Vodoun ceremonies are usually situated in an architectural framework, giving scope to his fascination with perspective. His paintings of Vodoun scenes incorporate the mystical appearances of the spirits in wildly imaginative forms. In ...

Article

Butler, Horacio  

Nelly Perazzo

(b Buenos Aires, Aug 28, 1897; d Buenos Aires, Mar 17, 1983).

Argentine painter, tapestry designer, and stage designer. From 1922 to 1933 he lived in Europe, where he studied first in Germany at the artistic colony in Worpswede and then in Paris under André Lhote and Othon Friesz. He was untouched by the violence of German Expressionism, but he assimilated various influences in France, structuring forms in the manner of Cézanne, and combining these with the audacious coloring of Fauvism and the strict sense of order in Cubism, as in The Siesta (1926; Buenos Aires, Mus. N. B.A.).

On his return to Argentina, Butler applied these European influences to lyrical landscapes of the islands in the Parana Delta of the Tigre region near Buenos Aires, selecting unusual scenes into which he incorporated childhood reminiscences in the figures. Using arabesques to link nature and people in his essentially flat pictures, he projected himself on to the scenery of which he was so fond in pictures such as the ...

Article

Cabelo  

Brazilian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1967, in Cachoeiro do Itapemirim.

Painter, performance artist.

Cabelo lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. He paints abstract motifs of primitive appearance on clothing and fabric laid out on the ground or hanging on walls. He assembles drawings on a canvas set up like a tent and containing fabric dolls connected by strings. He also makes videos in which semi-human, worm-like figures appear crawling through the streets of Rio, feeding on the eyes of fishes and ending up at a rock concert where satanic verses are chanted....

Article

Campos-Pons, Maria Magdalena  

Isobel Whitelegg

(b La Vega, Mantanzas, 1959).

Cuban painter, photographer, installation artist, and performance artist, active also in the USA. Campos-Pons studied at the Higher Institute of Art, Havana (1980–1985). Initially a painter, her graduation show Acoplamientos (1985; Havana, HIA) was concerned with representations of the female body as a device for prohibition and control, and her early work focused on the role of women in society and their representation within the history of art. In 1988 she went to the USA as a visiting artist at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and in 1991 she settled permanently in Boston. Using shaped canvases, her first works displayed an interest in the interrelationship between painting and three-dimensional media. While living in the USA she also expanded her interest in sculpture and installation to include elements of video and performance.

Living abroad also brought her relationship to Cuba into sharper relief; work produced in the early 1990s addressed her own displacement in relation to the enforced migration of her ancestors as slaves, and the way in which an imagined Africa is collectively created in contemporary Cuba by storytelling, the cultivation of traditional medicinal plants, and the practice of the Afro-Caribbean Santería religion. Using performance and video as a form of self-portraiture, another aspect of her practice focuses on her attempt to build a coherent identity as an Afro-Cuban woman living in the USA. With the aim of achieving simultaneity between performance and its immediate capture in the production of an unalterable image, her self-portraits employ large-format color Polaroid photography, as in the diptych ...

Article

Carrillo, Lilia  

Leonor Morales

(b Mexico City, Nov 2, 1930; d Mexico City, Jun 6, 1974).

Mexican painter and stage designer. She studied at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City and later in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. One of the pioneers of Art informel in Mexico, like her husband, Manuel Felguérez (whom she married in 1960), she formed part of a group of young painters who rebelled against the Mexican art establishment in the 1950s. Exhibiting her work widely during the 1960s, she aroused controversy by winning second prize with an abstract work at the Salón Esso (1965; Mexico City, Pal. B.A.). In 1968 she also helped set up the Salón Independiente as a protest against the government-subsidized Salón Solar on the occasion of the Olympic Games in Mexico City. She made several murals, but her most important works were her abstract easel paintings, displaying a fine use of color. In the 1960s she also worked as a stage designer....

Article

Clark, Lygia  

Denise Carvalho

(b Belo Horizonte, Oct 23, 1920; d Rio de Janeiro, Apr 25, 1988).

Brazilian painter, sculptor, interactive artist, and art therapist. She was a cofounder in 1959 of the Neo-Concrete movement, whose members laid the foundation for much of Brazilian contemporary art. The Neo-Concretists broke with the rigidity of the rationalism of Concrete art and advocated a more sensorial, interactive art. Lygia Clark and her creative soul-mate, Hélio Oiticica, created participatory works that challenged not only longstanding artistic dogmas, but also the role of the art object itself, as well as the role of the artist, the spectator, and the art institution. Their most groundbreaking works required the viewer to be part of the artwork and thereby experience it sensorially, all of which made their work difficult to categorize. Clark came to see even her exhibitions at major art events as meaningless, and her emphasis on person-to-person dialogue eventually led her into art therapy. Without a therapeutic license, she devoted her last decades solely to treating patients with her own form of art therapy....

Article

Coen, Arnaldo  

Margarita González Arredondo

revised by Ana Garduño

(b Mexico City, Jun 10, 1940).

Mexican painter, sculptor, illustrator, and stage designer. Coen was self-taught when he took up painting in 1956 with the encouragement of Diego Rivera, but from 1956 to 1960 he studied graphic design with the American publicist Gordon Jones. During those years he worked in an Abstract Expressionist manner, although he soon incorporated figurative elements and, from around 1963 onward, elements of fantasy.

In the 1950s until the early 1970s, he was one of the indispensable creators of the collective exhibitions organized by the Juan Martín Gallery, the most important platform for vanguard art in Mexico City at that time. This gallery also dedicated four individual exhibitions to the work of Coen. In 1967 he went to Paris on a French government grant. In the following year he was a founder-member of the Salón Independiente, where he began to exhibit acrylic sculptures of the female torso.

He systematically returned to working the image of the feminine. These were followed between ...

Article

Davila, Juan  

Paul Foss

(b Santiago, Oct 6, 1946).

Australian painter and performance artist of Chilean birth. He studied law and fine arts at the University of Chile. Following the coup of 1973, he arrived in Melbourne as a tourist after meeting an Australian in Buenos Aires, and later took up residence. He exhibited widely in Australia, Europe, and South America, returning frequently to Chile, which, thematically and politically, remained a focus for his art. He worked primarily with the quotation of cultural ephemera (e.g. newspaper photographs, advertisements, etc.). Originally noted for his adaptations of Pop art in an effort to rewrite the international history of painting from a provincial or Third World perspective, he increasingly developed a hybrid pictorial language that refused the strict confines of Modernism or Postmodernism, seen, for example, in Fable of Australian Painting (1982–1983; U. Sydney, Power Gal. Contemp. A.). His art deals with fragments, attempting to present a utopia of narrative from another place and time. In canvases such as ...

Article

Ehrenberg, Felipe  

Julieta Ortiz Gaitán

(b Mexico City, Jun 27, 1943).

Mexican painter, printmaker, performance artist, writer, teacher, and publisher. He qualified as a printmaker at a very early age, then as a painter and engraver under the tutelage of several masters, among whom the most influential on his life was José Chávez Morado. Although he at first worked with traditional media, he possessed a constantly innovative and critical attitude and experimented with performances, installations, happenings, correspondence art, and media art, as well as writing, lecturing, and publishing on such themes as artistic experimentation, cultural promotion, professional management for artists, collective mural painting, and the publishing process. From 1968 to 1972 Ehrenberg lived in England where, with the architect Martha Hellion and the critic and historian David Mayor, he founded the Beau Geste Press/Libro Acción Libre in Devon, to propagate the work of artists involved with the Fluxus movement of the 1970s. He was also instrumental in the rise of many artistic groups, workshops and small publishing houses, such as ...

Article

Espínola Gómez, Manuel  

Angel Kalenberg

(b Solís de Mataojo, Lavalleja, Jul 5, 1921; d Montevideo, May 20, 2003).

Uruguayan painter. He showed an early talent as a portrait painter and was encouraged by the Uruguayan composer and violinist Eduardo Fabini to study formally. With Fabini’s help he obtained a scholarship to study, briefly, at the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Montevideo under the Uruguayan master Guillermo Laborde (1886–1940) and later under José Cúneo. In 1946 he won second prize at the Salón Nacional de Bellas Artes in Montevideo, and in 1948, together with Washington Barcala, Luis Solari, and Juan Ventayol (1911–1971), he founded the Grupo Carlos Federico Sáez, which had a dynamic effect on local art circles. Espínola Gómez was much affected by his visit to the São Paulo Biennale in 1953, where he saw Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and tapestries by Henri-Georges Adam, and by his first trip to Europe in 1957. The range of his subject matter, as indicated by major paintings such as ...

Article

Fazzolari, Fernando  

Horacio Safons

(b Buenos Aires, Sept 28, 1949).

Argentine painter and stage designer. After a series of pictures featuring hallucinatory images of disembodied mouths and orifices, bodies, and pits, he began to treat circus scenes, exploiting their symbolic suggestiveness by representing candles, ladders, insects, and animals of arbitrary size alongside ambiguous human forms. Falling somewhere between the merry and the tragic, they have a theatrical aspect consonant with his experience as a stage designer. Combining a lively, almost festive palette with thick paint, sometimes violently applied, Fazzolari emerged in the 1980s as one of the leading Neo-Expressionist painters in Argentina....

Article

Gerzso, Gunther  

Xavier Moyssén

revised by Rita Eder

(b Mexico City, Jun 17, 1915; d Mexico City, Apr 21, 2000).

Mexican designer, director, screenwriter, and painter. Gerzso was born in Mexico City, trained in Germany and the United States, and would have dedicated his career exclusively to theater and film set design were it not for a casual meeting with some artists identified with Surrealism—particularly, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Pèret (1899–1959), Leonora Carrington, and Esteban Francés (1913–1976)—who had arrived in Mexico as World War II refugees in the early 1940s and changed the course of Gerzso’s life by encouraging him to start painting. Soon, they would connect him with André Breton, who would publish the image of one of his paintings in the magazine VVV, which Breton directed in the early 1940s from his exile in New York. Gerzo’s painting for the fourth number of this magazine was titled El descuartizado, or The Dismembered, the most relevant work of his surrealist period. El descuartizado is the fragmentation of the body juxtaposed with a semi-abstract landscape in which a strange ritual occurs, underscoring the body and transforming it into plant-like organs, where he highlights a toothed vagina: one of Surrealism’s most emblematic images....

Article

Graciano, Clovis  

Brazilian, 20th century, male.

Born 1907, in São Paulo.

Painter. Genre scenes.

Clovis Graciano exhibited at the open exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne held in Paris in 1946 and organised by the United Nations. His works include Dancer ( Bailarina).

São Paulo, 23 June 1981...

Article

Greco, Alberto  

Horacio Safons

(b Buenos Aires, Jan 14, 1915; d Barcelona, Oct 14, 1965).

Argentine painter, sculptor, performance artist, conceptual artist, poet, and illustrator. After studying in Buenos Aires at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes and with Cecilia Marcovich and Tomás Maldonado, he quickly established a reputation for his scandalous views, attracting extreme disapproval and equally strong support. After delivering a lecture at the Juan Cristóbal bookshop, Buenos Aires, entitled “Alberto Greco y los pájaros” he was briefly imprisoned for his “Communism and subversive acts.” On his release in the same year he travelled to Paris on a French government grant, selling drawings and watercolors in the cafés and studying painting with Fernand Léger and printmaking with Johnny Friedlaender. Between 1956 and 1958 he lived in São Paulo, where he became aware of Art informel; he painted in this style in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Glusberg 1985, 284–285).

As early as 1959, when he had returned from São Paulo to Buenos Aires, Greco had expressed his corrosive vision of society through the form of his work. In his shows he exhibited tree trunks and rags for cleaning window gratings or floors. He moved again to Paris in ...

Article

Guerrero, Juan Agustín  

Alexandra Kennedy

(b Quito, 1818; d Quito, 1880).

Ecuadorean painter and musician. He was involved in the foundation of the Escuela Miguel de Santiago in Quito in 1849 (transformed in 1852 into the Escuela Democratica Miguel de Santiago), and he won third prize for his painting Modesty (Quito, Mus. Fund. Hallo) when the school held the first public art exhibition in Ecuador. He criticized the dependence of Ecuadorean art on Spanish and other European models, and he fought for the liberation of oppressed social classes and particularly of the indigenous people, as well as for individual creativity and the autonomy of the artist from the ecclesiastical powers that remained dominant in Ecuador at that time. Stylistically, Guerrero represented the transition from Quito’s colonial Baroque style to Romanticism. He introduced watercolor painting into Ecuador and used the medium to illustrate, criticize, and satirize leading figures of the time. His album of drawings and watercolors of landscapes, personalities, and customs of the period (...