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(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 Mexico City, 1981).

Mexican conceptual artist. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bonillas started his career before, and instead of, undertaking an official fine arts education. Widely and internationally exhibited before he reached age 20, his work began with highly analytical studies of ordinary photographic procedures such as printing (in his foundational piece, Trabajos fotográficos, 1998) or pressing the shutter (Diez cámaras documentadas acústicamente, 1998).

Bonillas’s work investigates the materiality and semiotic depth of the photographic medium in a somewhat topographic manner: starting, and never ending, in a periphery that stands ambiguously as both the material margins of photography as well as its self-reflective dimension. However, the “peripheral” nature of Bonillas’s inquiry quickly reveals itself as a strategy to address core aspects of a medium whose substance lies, precisely, on its surface. As the artist exerts infinite variations on generic aspects of the photographic practice, alternately related to structure and meaning (primary colors, family photographs, erasures, captioning, fiction, archival habits, etc.), he delivers a paradox with each of his works. In them, background becomes foreground, face becomes pigment, anecdote becomes the main theme, stain becomes signature, and vice versa....

(b Lima, Mar 13, 1965).

Peruvian draftsman and conceptual artist. Between the years 1981 and 1984, he studied in Lima in the studio of the sculptor Cristina Gálvez (1919–1982) at the Facultad de Arte at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and later with the painter Leslie Lee. Between 1984 and 1986 he studied art at Université Paris VIII, and, between 1986 and 1990, in Christian Boltanski’s workshop at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In the 1990s, living between Lima and Berlin, Bryce began to foreground the archive as theme and source material in his practice. His paintings, Cronologías (1997–1998), were based on the media coverage of the era in which Alberto Fujimori was president of Peru (1990–2000). In 1999 he simplified this approach with Untitled, using only black ink on paper, the first example of Bryce’s signature style, which he called análisis mimético (mimetic analysis): the meticulous copying of images or documents from archives, often in large selections. ...

(b Lübeck, 1937).

Uruguayan conceptual artist, critic, educator, and curator of German birth, active in the USA. Of Jewish ancestry, he fled with his family to Uruguay in 1939. He studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1953–1957 and 1959–1962, working with students to reform the school’s curriculum. In 1961, a Guggenheim fellowship took him to New York to study printmaking. Though he retained his Uruguayan citizenship, he settled permanently in New York, where he taught at the Pratt Graphics Art Center; co-founded the New York Graphic Workshop in 1964 with Liliana Porter (b 1941) and José Guillermo Castillo (1938–1999); and in 1971 helped establish New York’s Museo Latinoamericano and its subsequent splinter group, the Movimiento de Independencia Cultural de Latino América. From the 1970s, political repression in Latin America inspired a series of conceptual installations that addressed such issues as language, identity, freedom, political violence, and the role of art. For Camnitzer, the task of the artist was to identify and express the problems that surrounded him, transforming art into a political instrument. His questioning of traditional values applied not only to the themes of his work, but to its material form; employing objects of little intrinsic value, he rejected traditional notions of art as beautiful and of commercial worth....

Conceptualism designates art for which the “concept”—as idea, information, language, action, experience, or documentation—defines the work more so than any painting, sculpture, or other object that may be a component (see also Conceptual art). In Latin America, conceptualism has not been a single movement so much as a tendency found in multiple milieux since the 1960s. The earliest works date to the early 1960s, taking the form of actions and participatory situations that used prevailing genres as points of departure. In Brazil, neo-concrete artists such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica systematically folded their paintings off the wall into three-dimensional space, gradually calibrating them for manipulation by viewers (see also Concrete art in Latin America and Neoconcretism). In December 1959 critic Ferreira Gullar coined the term “non-object” to describe an artwork “freed from any signification outside the event of its own apparition” that yields “a synthesis of sensorial and mental experiences” (Asbury ...

(b Buenos Aires, Oct 5, 1940).

Argentine poet, critic, conceptual artist, painter, and sculptor. He studied literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), graduating in 1964. Between 1959 and 1966 he co-published the literary magazine Airón (Heron) with Madela Ezcurra, Leandro Katz, and other former students of Jaime Rest (1927–1979) at UBA’s Philosophy and Literature Department. In 1965 he joined a group of young intellectuals studying semiotics and media theory with the theorist Oscar Masotta (1930–1979). In 1966, working with fellow Masotta associates Raúl Escari (1944–2016) and Roberto Jacoby (b 1944), Costa co-wrote Un arte de los medios de comunicación, a manifesto for inserting works of informational art within the circuits of the mass media. This text accompanied the trio’s first work of this new genre, Happening para un jabalí difunto (Happening for a Dead Boar, 1966; 2014 exh. cat., 29), a fictional description of a happening distributed to different Argentine newspapers and magazines followed by an explanation one month later, in which the artists wrote: “[A]ll that matters is the image that the news media construct out of this artistic occurrence” (see Costa ...

(b Buenos Aires, Sept 29, 1936; d New York, Aug 27, 2016).

Argentine painter, installation artist, conceptual artist, and video artist, active also in the USA. He is best known as experimental producer of early public-access cable programming. In 1946, at the age of 14, he began an apprenticeship with the artist Simón Feldman, an exponent of the teachings of André Lhote, an original member of the Section d’Or group in Paris who saw Cubism’s precepts as repeatable and teachable. Davidovich’s earliest exhibited paintings, c. 1950, demonstrate Lhotean figuration, but after seeing Mark Rothko and other abstract expressionists at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio in 1956, he quickly transitioned to gestural abstraction, the first in a career-long series of shifts in search of the most avant-garde styles or media. In 1960 Davidovich was recruited by the Arturo Frondizi government in Argentina to teach advanced art in Bahía Blanca, although he continued to exhibit regularly in Buenos Aires with the Arte Nuevo avant-gardes. In this period, he studied painting at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires in ...

(b Miami, FL, May 12, 1968).

Cuban American conceptual artist. Known for her immersive installations and grand public art projects that represent natural phenomena, Fernández explored the potential of artifice to create authentic perceptual and psychological effects, and to reveal the degree to which reality is constructed. From 1997 she resided in Brooklyn, New York, and visited Japan for work almost yearly. She earned her BFA at Florida International University, Miami (1990) and her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (1992). She received a MacArthur Foundation“Genius Grant” (2005) and was the first Latina to serve on the US Commission of Fine Arts (2011–2014).

In her installations and public sculptures Fernández made sublime, abstracted waterfalls, wisteria, fire, stars, pools, ocean, beach, sand dunes, sunset, aurora borealis, bamboo, gardens, snow, clouds, fog, and dew. Her clearly artificial “nature” uncannily feels more real than reality. The experience of viewing her work shifts from seeing paint fade up a wall to being overtaken by the feeling of standing on a misty ...

(b Buenos Aires, Sept 3, 1920; d Buenos Aires, Jul 24, 2013).

Argentine conceptual artist, poet, and sculptor. In 1947 Ferrari earned his bachelor degree in Engineering at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Between 1952 and 1955, while in Italy seeking medical treatment for his daughter, Ferrari began to experiment with ceramics, and exhibited work in Rome and Milan. In early 1960s, back in Argentina, he began to make wire sculptures and written drawings. During his fifteen-year exile in Brazil from 1976 to 1985, he experimented with a great range of media and art practices, from sculptures, drawings, etchings, collages of pictures and bird excrement, and sound-making sculptures (berimbau) to mail art, videotext, and photocopy. By the 1990s he produced his so-called “deformed calligraphies,” written paintings and electronic art, along with collages that skillfully combined Christian iconography, contemporary events, oriental erotica, and texts in Braille. Ferrari’s work often expresses a provocative social and political critique against war, Christianity, abuses of power, the West’s moral double standards, and the bourgeois character of art institutions....

(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 ...

(b Havana, Jun 21, 1966).

Cuban conceptual artist, active in the Dominican Republic. Henríquez explored aesthetic politics by combining art and popular culture with design savvy and wit to counter neocolonialist, racist, and gender hierarchies. She studied under 1980s Cuban Renaissance artists and received her MFA from Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana (1992). She went on to collaborate with Consuelo Castañeda (1989–1996). Henríquez lived in Mexico and Miami (1991–1997), then returned to her intermittent home Santo Domingo. ARTnews (September 2007) named Henríquez one of twenty-five art world trendsetters.

Henríquez challenged center/periphery power dynamics, crossing northern art history with Dominican street styles or examining First and Third World intellectual exchange. Her conceptualism asked questions like whose aesthetic criteria counts, where. She also thought beyond center/periphery dualities to deconstruct power relations. She challenged gender and nationalist stereotyping together with her feminized collages of hyper-masculine newspaper images of Dominican baseball stars abroad. She compared foreign and local representations of “Dominicaness.” To address insider Dominican–Haitian tension, she videotaped two Haitian construction workers in the Dominican Republic playing catch with a cement block whose game devolves into exhaustion. In another series, she reoriented the geographical poles of marginalization from North–South to East–West by comparing California and New York art. Yet another artwork was a model of multiple, movable centers: viewers wheel around on stools emblazoned with a photograph of an umbilicus....

(b Buenos Aires, Jun 6, 1938).

Argentine poet, photographer, conceptual artist, filmmaker, and educator. One of the founders of the literary magazine Airón (Heron, 1960–1965), he studied Philosophy and Literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. His career-long investigation into linguistic systems and alphabets appeared as early as his linotype-illustrated book OOOO (1961; see 2013 publication, 40–41). In 1962, in the midst of traveling through the Amazon to Central America, he helped found the Tzántzicos, an avant-garde poetry group in Quito, Ecuador. He moved to New York City in 1965, and his work gradually transitioned from poetry and prose to an interdisciplinary conceptualism. He worked as a set and lighting designer for Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company between 1968 and 1975. In 1970 he founded The Vanishing Rotating Triangle Press with Ted Castle and David Lee, an independent venture that translated Spanish books into English and vice versa, while also publishing Katz’s artist books and distributing Situationist-inspired “unauthorized publications.” In his first shift to the production of objects, in ...

(b Taichung, Feb 16, 1964).

Taiwanese conceptual artist, active also in the USA. From the age of six, Lee Mingwei spent six summers training and living under the care of a Ch’an Buddhist monk in the mountains near Taichung. These experiences of quietude, compassionate behavior, and attentiveness to the quotidian aspects of life were formative in his development as an artist. Lee studied biology and architecture before completing a BFA Hons (Textile Art) from California College of Arts in 1993, and a MFA (Sculpture) from Yale University Graduate School of Fine Arts in 1997. Lee’s first major public presence, a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1998, received acclaim, and he soon began presenting projects in biennales and museums throughout Australia, Asia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. His first major survey was presented by Mori Art Museum in 2015 and toured to Taipei and Auckland....

(b São Paulo, 1961).

Brazilian installation artist and sculptor. She studied at the private college Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP), São Paulo, from 1979 to 1984, earning her Licenciatura Plena there. Leirner is known for her compelling accumulations of consumer objects, which she organized and assembled into installations.

Leirner was introduced to contemporary art at an early age by her parents, Fúlvia and Adolfo Leirner, who had a large art collection that included Brazilian Constructivist work. During her time at FAAP, instructors there included Nelson Leirner (her uncle; b 1932), Julio Plaza (1938–2003), Regina Silveira (b 1939), and Walter Zanini (1925–2013). In 1981 she traveled to New York and Europe, where her interest in conceptual art, Minimalism, and Arte Povera developed. The next year, she had her first solo exhibition at the Galeria Tenda in São Paulo, where she showed Imagens objetuais (Objectual Images, 1982), a series of collages comprised of cord, wire, and paper. The series’ title highlights the ambiguity of the work of art, which is at once an image—a representation of something—and an object—a physical thing....

(b São Paulo, 1960).

Brazilian multimedia artist and photographer. Mano graduated in 1984 from the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo de Santos, São Paulo. In the late 1980s he was part of a group of photographers hired by newspaper Folha de São Paulo as part of an effort to renew its photojournalism. Between 1992 and 1998 Mano formed, alongside Eli Sudbrack (b 1968), Everton Ballardin, and José Fujocka Neto (b 1969), the group Panoramas da Imagens, which organized exhibitions and symposia discussing photography theory and practice. While Mano never abandoned photography, his work gradually began to encompass other media. He is better known for works in public space addressing urban experience, social practices, and landscape.

Mano’s earliest major work was detetor de ausências (1994), commissioned for the second edition of Arte/Cidade—an urban intervention project conceived by philosopher and curator Nelson Brissac Peixoto. It consisted of two military-grade reflectors whose light beams intersected with a flyover at pedestrian level, thus engulfing vehicles and passersby. Like ...

(b Rio de Janeiro, 1948).

Brazilian interventionist, multimedia, installation, and conceptual artist. Meireles is considered one of the most influential contemporary artists of his country. While international critics have compared his work with North American Minimalism and Conceptual art, Meireles insisted that art should be seductive. He studied at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes and at the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro. Coming of age at a time of the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964–1985), he circumvented strict state censorship with a series of interventionist works, adding politically charged texts and reinserting the works back into circulation.

In Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project (1970), Meireles printed the text “Yankees. Go Home!” onto Coca-Cola glass bottles which would enter circulation after they were returned to be refilled and sold. In Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Cédula Project (1970), the same message was printed on one dollar bills, and on the current Brazilian currency, the Cruzeiro. Some bills also queried, “Who killed Herzog?” referring to a Brazilian journalist who died while in police custody. Meireles’ series subverts the mechanistic process of capitalistic insertion and circulation, adding phrases that question the methods and policies of the dictatorship. ...

(b Belo Horizonte, Nov 12, 1967).

Brazilian multimedia artist. Neuenschwander uses a variety of media, from intervention, installation, to conceptual and video art. Most of her work is interactive and focuses on communication, objects, and nature, letting the work of art develop with an amount of uncertainty. She studied at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and at the Royal College of Art in London. Some of her artistic endeavors have been compared to the work of Lygia Clark, as well as that of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica.

In I Wish Your Wish (2003; exhibited at the Carnegie International in 2008), hundreds of participants were asked about their wishes, which were then silkscreened on colorful ribbons and exhibited in the gallery. Visitors then tied ribbons on their wrists, leaving a wish behind; the wish would come true only when the worn ribbon fell off, an idea based on a popular tradition of votive exchange. In ...

(b Mexico City, 1967).

Mexican installation and conceptual artist. He dropped out of school when he was 16 years old and began making art on his own. Between 1987 and 1992 he attended the Taller de los Viernes (Friday Workshop), a series of informal meetings held at Gabriel Orozco’s studio bringing together young artists including Abraham Cruzvillegas, Gabriel Kuri (b 1970), and Dr. Lakra (b 1972). During that period, and deeply inspired by the political work of José Guadalupe Posada and of Mexican muralists, Ortega became a satirical cartoonist for local newspapers and magazines. This experience infused his future deconstructive and gravity-defying pieces with a sense of playfulness and wit.

Influenced by Duchamp’s ready-mades, Ortega appropriated and then reinvented everyday objects by placing them into a specific cultural context, turning them into unique-looking artifacts. For example, in Tortillas Construction Module (1998; 2014 exh. cat., 26), Ortega cut slits into the edges of fifty crisply baked tortillas (a Mesoamerican food staple) then fitted them together to create a structure resembling a modernist building. He dissected mundane objects into their constituent parts to further rearrange them into alternative formations. ...

(b Antwerp, Feb 5, 1940).

Belgian conceptual artist. He adopted the pseudonym Panamarenko at the outset of his artistic career. He studied at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp (1955–60), and at the National Hoger Instituut, Antwerp (1962–4). He was active in various Happenings in Antwerp between 1964 and 1966. With friends Hugo Heyrman (b 1942), Bernd Lohaus (b 1940) and Wout Vercammen (b 1938) among others, he produced a photocopied magazine called Happening News (c. 1964–6). From 1966 to 1968 he made what he called ‘poetic objects’, which included such quiet, contemplative works as Snow (leather bag, rubber boots, twigs and snow, 1966; priv. col., see 1978 exh. cat., p. 98) and Moths in Reeds (moths, reeds and motor, 1967; Naarden, Becht Col., see 1978 exh. cat., p. 103), and also a large, bicycle-driven structure, Aeroplane (aluminium and mixed media, 1967...

(b Tiradentes, Jul 11, 1980).

Brazilian multimedia artist. Early in his career, Rocha Pitta practiced mainly photography, but soon turned to projects in which original and found images become juxtaposed with materials as diverse as earth, stone, food, newspapers cutouts, car parts, and cement. His interest lay not in the substantive sculptural quality of materials, but rather in their capacity to signify circulation, apprehension, conversion, and communal use, depending on the situation. His work often pits the commodity form against different conceptions of use and display drawn from universes as diverse as police photographs and religious art.

Provisional Heritage (2010), exhibited both at Sprovieri Gallery, London, and at the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, comprises photographs and a film recording the pouring of the contents of cans of expired tomato soup and coffee drink found at an abandoned factory in East London. The liquids act as tokens of failed commodity circulation in an area that was itself caught between dereliction and real-estate speculation. Failed monumentality is also a recurrent topic in his work. ...