Extreme Abstraction: Argentine Artists of the ’60s

The 1960s in Argentina were marked by experimentation and the expansion of the limits of art. Artists like Julio Le Parc, Rogelio Polesello, and Alejandro Puente explored new realms of abstraction. Influenced by science, they probed human perception and the laws of vision, creating paintings that appear to dance and buzz before the eye. Technology and new social perspectives changed the visual culture of the period, and other experiments centered on the link between art and reality, often incorporating new materials into groundbreaking works.

Dr. Mariana Marchesi, Artistic Director of Argentina’s National Fine Arts Museum in Buenos Aires, will begin with an overview of 1960s Argentine art in international and regional contexts. Dr. Marchesi and the Blanton Curator of Latin American Art, Dr. Vanessa Davidson, will then join in a conversation about Argentine pioneers of the 1960s. They’ll take viewers on a virtual tour of Expanding Abstraction: Pushing the Boundaries of Painting in the Americas, 1958–1983, focusing on Latin American artists and their contributions to international languages of abstraction.

About our Speakers

Dr. Mariana Marchesi is an art historian and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires where she focuses on Argentine and Latin American modern and contemporary art, and museum studies. She is Artistic Director at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires. She is president of the Argentine Center of Art Historians (CAIA)

She is editor of the academic journal Caiana. Revista de historia del arte y cultura visual and the visual art magazine Blanco sobre Blanco. Miradas y lecturas sobre artes visuales. Marchesi’s research on Latin American and Argentinean contemporary art has been included in local and international publications on the subject. Her most recent exhibitions include: Arte de sistemas. El CAYC y el proyecto de un nuevo arte regional (2013), Abstracción y tradición americana(2015), La explosión de la forma (2015), Venecia en clave verde. Nicolás García Uriburu y la coloración del Gran Canal (2018), Julio Le Parc. Transición Buenos Aires-París. 1955-1960. (2019) y CAYC: Chile 1973 / Argentina 1985. La exposición olvidada y una lectura a cuatro artistas chilenos (2020).

Vanessa Davidson received a B.A. in Hispano-American Literature from Harvard University, and studied Latin American art and Argentine poetry at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as Portuguese at the Universidade de São Paulo. She has worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to conduct dissertation research in Argentina and Brazil in 2009, and received her Ph.D. in 20th Century Latin American Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2011. She worked at Phoenix Art Museum as Shawn and Joe Lampe Curator of Latin American Art for eight years, during which time she organized twelve major exhibitions, two of which traveled internationally. She assumed her role as Curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum of Art in October 2019.

Image Credit: Rogelio Polesello, Dos diagonals [Two Diagonals], 1980, acrylic on canvas, 63 3/8 x 63 3/8 in., Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Barbara Duncan, 1991