2nd International Art Biennial of Buenos Aires

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2nd International Art Biennial of Buenos Aires
at the National Museum of Fine Arts
- Official press release -

The 2nd International Art Biennial of Buenos Aires, organized by the National Museum of Fine Arts, will take place from Thursday, November 7, through Sunday, December 8.

Artists, theoreticians, art critics, and museum directors from different countries have been convened for this event.

For over a month it will be possible to attend shows of consummate artists and of the next generation. This Biennial does not attempt to compete with the renowned Venice or Sao Paulo Biennials. Rather, the goal we are pursuing is akin to that of the Whitney Museum's Biennial in New York: to educate our artists, make them known by art critics and people interested in the visual arts from Latin-America interested in recent works of contemporary art.

Art has been a uniting factor for human beings ever since our ancestors painted the caverns of Altamira and Lascaux, twenty-two thousand years ago. Art has survived time and struggles, division among men. It is humanity's highest common denominator, it's never ending source of harmony.

This second encounter, will include, among others, Marcel Alocco (1937, France) who - in his early period, as part of the Fluxus group - employed different materials to later experiment on the transformation of form utilizing bed sheets as the base. During the 70's he made his Patchwork Painting Fragments, with fabrics that were first painted and later torn. "The work over continuity and discontinuity relates to the theories of modern physics", said Michel Butor, with whom Alocco collaborated on a famous artist book. With an interest in the history of fabric, since 1995 he worked with small, basic wefts, and in recent years he produced multiples with his previous research on textiles.

Miroslaw Balka, from Poland, was a leader of the German-Russian group New Pregnancy during the 80's. After several years of collective proposals, a key concept for the groups of those times, the artists started working on a personal level with particular forms and ideologies. Balka complainted against the cold intellectuality of the graduates of the Art school of Poznan, when they showed interest in the drawings of children's imagination, lyrical objects like fairy tales which emerged from the fabrics and materialized in a third dimension. The topic of children's imagination was later replaced by the existential dramas of human beings in the Socialist countries then colonized by Soviet Russia.

Mark Brusse - special guest of the Government of Holland - will carry out an installation. In the 1970s he was in the avant-garde of conceptual art and later of performances. He worked for some time with Marta Minujín.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Russians who have lived in New York City for over ten years, have had exhibits in the top art museums in the world and are placed among the most highly respected and renowned in today's art production.

Lucio Pozzi (Milano, 1935) will attend the Biennial in Buenos Aires. He lives in New York City since 1962 and participated in the minimal movement. In recent years his automatic writing has led him to mythological paintings. "I have been eternally captivated by Jean Dubuffet's works and by Mark Tobey's calligraphy clouds," Pozzi explained.

Jesús Silva, Director of Cultural Affairs in Spain's Foreign Ministry, sends us an exhibit of works by Spanish artist Manuel Rivera (1927-1995). Rivera was a member of the El Paso Group (1957-1960) which introduced informalism in Spain, one of the keys of 20th century art in that country. "But not everything was lyrics or color. In Rivera's works of the 1960s there is also criticism of Spain: he is capable of building a circumspect Inquisitor's Mirror, according to Juan Manuel Bonet, current director of the National Museum Reina Sofia, an art critic and friend of Argentina. The dramatic feeling of his works increasingly deepened since the mid-70s when he went back to black and white. In 1987 he produced his torn fabrics Broken Mirrors and Hurt Mirrors. In 1994, always in search for something different, he created new sculptures. "I have never gotten beyond the experimental. My life as a man and as an artist has been a continuous search."

Works by Alexander Brodsky (Russia) will also be exhibited. Brodsky was one of the most successful creators in the last Sao Paulo Biennial, and is an architect and artist as our own Clorindo Testa.

In the Video category there will be a special submission from France by fifteen artists living in France: Videotraffic. Produced by the AFAA (French Association of Artistic Action), it explores the contemporary art scene in France through installations, photographs, performances, videos, and its places for dissemination: museums, galleries, movie theaters. Videotraffic presents works freed from traditional classifications and questions reality with ephemeral, temporary and immaterial images. It opens the space, demands an architecture, but is always an adventure of explorations of new sceneries.

Among others artists, will also be present: Josef Daberning, Freiderike Pezold (Austria); Ku Yan (China); Delcy Morelos (Colombia); Seppo Renvall, Heli Rekula (Finland); Jacques Mandelbrojt, Anne and Patrick Poirier, Sarkis (France); Alex Flemming (Germany-Brazil); Uri Katzenstein (Israel); Antoni Miro, Antoni Muntadas (Spain); Peter Johansson, Annica Karlsson Rixon (Sweden); Bedri Baykam (Turkey); John Clive, Hannah Gal (UK).

XIX Criticism Conference

The first four days (November 7th - 10th) the Biennial will be concurrent with the XIX Criticism Conference. Every day, from 2:00pm through 9:00pm, lectures and round tables with first rate panelists will be held at the National Museum of Fine Arts auditorium, with the participation of the curators of the exhibits, invited artists, renowned national and international specialists, and theoreticians.

The following have also confirmed their participation: Daniel Abadie, Jeu de Paume Museum Director, Paris, France; Carmen Alemán, Crític, Panama; Leonor Amarante, Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil; Angélica Baumer, Historian, Austria; Hubert Besacier, Historian, France; Diane Camber, Bass Museum of Art Director, Miami, USA; Consuelo Ciscar Casaban, Valencia Museums Director, Spain; Heinrik Igitian, Armenian Museums Director; Angel Kalenberg, Visual Arts Museum Director, Montevideo, Uruguay; Jan-Eric Lundstrom, Critic, Sweden; Ylona Marosi, Critic, Hungary; Heitor Reis, Modern Art Museum Director, Salvador Bahía, Brazil; Anda Rotenberg, Crític, Poland; Adrienne Samos, Curator, Panamá; Svilen Stefanov, Critic, Bulgaria; Darío Ruiz Gomez, Crític, Colombia; Peter Weibel, Critic, Austria; Miguel Zugaza, Prado Museum Director, Madrid, Spain and Julian Zugazagoitía, Curator, Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA.

As a place for encounters and exchanges, the XIX Criticism Conference promote dialog and sharing of experiences and theories. Advances in communications, from telematics to air transportation, permit today immediate access to books, magazines and other publications about art. Yet nothing has ever replaced - nor will it replace in McLuhan's global village - face-to-face contact.

Criticism, an activity born in mid-18th century is neither supplemental nor subordinate: it is an indispensable and inseparable component of aesthetic creativity.

Organized by the National Museum of Fine Arts with the support of the Embassies of Armenia, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, the Czech Republic, El Salvador, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Russia, Spain, Turkey and Uruguay; and the sponsorship of the School of Architecture (University of Buenos Aires), University of Palermo, Epson, Channel 5 Plus Satelital-Cablevision, Andreani Foundation, Daniel Maman Fine Arts Gallery and TAM Air Lines.

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