The editorial categories are research topics that have guided researchers during the recovery phase and continue to be the impetus behind the Documents Project’s digital archive and the Critical Documents book series. Developed by the project’s Editorial Board, each of the teams analyzed this framework and adapted it to their local contexts in developing their research objectives and work plans during the Recovery Phase. Learn more on the Editorial Framework page.
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The article reviews the exhibition of Miguel Ángel Nigro and Graciela Hasper, developed in the hall of the Teatro de las Provincias, characterized by the author as a “place…doubly eccentric because of its location and the artists that it attracts and exhibits, and because it is in precarious condition at the moment, caused by chronic lack of funds.” On the other hand, Lebenglik describes the works of each one of the mentioned artists. In the case of Nigro, he affirms the existing congruence between his paintings and objects from “daily situations, those always related to arte povera and the ready made,” besides the space where they are shown. With regards to Hasper, the author understands her paintings as “absolutely flat”; nevertheless, he adds that this is not only due to the fact that they “lack perspective, but that all the weight of her painting is right on the surface of the canvas [and that] it is there where irony and irreverence play against each other, and not in the supposed profundity of the motifs that she represents.”
Art critic Fabián Lebenglik became one of the key players of the 1990s Argentinean art, mainly from his Section of the Visual Arts appeared on Tuesdays at the daily Página/12 (Buenos Aires). This text establishes a dialogue with two other articles in the same page of Página/12 on Tuesday, December 19, 1989, titled “When the sides enclose the center. One leader from the periphery and two of his young followers establish two or three new rules…” and “Gumier- Maier,” both signed by Miguel Briante. The three texts turn around the axis of the “center-periphery” relation within the Buenos Aires art scene. The artists Marcelo Pombo, Miguel Harte, and Graciela Hasper (all mentioned in the previous articles) formed part of what was later called “The Rojas Group”; meaning those artists that the Galería del Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas (directed by Jorge Gumier-Maier) brought together between 1989 and the beginning of the nineties. They were understood, in a generic manner, as the representatives of Argentinean art in those years. The reference to poetics of the past, such as Pop art, minimalism, Concrete art (under extremely personal reformulations), besides elements of kitsch, have helped to characterize the resources of expression of such artists. On the other hand, this article should also be linked to the visual principles “rejected” by one side and “proposed” by the other that Gumier-Maier outlined in La Hoja del Rojas [The Rojas Leaflet] under the title “Avatares del Arte” [Avatars of Art] in June, 1989, upon the opening of La Galería de “El Rojas,” which can thus be understood as the “foundational manifesto” of that space (see record 768333).