Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The article “¡Que viva Manrique!” [Hooray for Manrique!], written by the editorial team at the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador and published on April 16, 1996, referred to Pedro Manrique Figueroa. Precursor del Collage en Colombia [Pedro [...]

Jorge Romero Brest, the art critic and director of the Centro de Artes Visuales [Center for the Visual Arts], writes about the style and attitude he sees in Antonio Berni’s work, discussing the changes that can be observed in the artist’s [...]

In his essay in the catalogue for the exhibition titled Antonio Berni: oleos y collages [Antonio Berni: Oil Paintings and Collages] (Buenos Aires, Imagen Galería de Arte, 1974), Berni writes about the Surrealist influence in his work, and about his [...]

This text presents an argument in favor of collage as a visual arts medium in spite of the “poca importancia” [little importance] it had for the general public, as well as in regard to the disdain generated by the technique’s materials [...]

Kenneth Kemble presents the works he created since 1956. He explains the collage from his point of view. arguing that the search for experimentation with application of new materials is fundamental in the new visual arts. Unlike the surrealist [...]

Kemble develops a historical and formalist view of art, both from a Western and Eastern perspective, to arrive at the stylistic evolution present in both the 20th century and in his own work, which he analyzes from inception and through his personal [...]

Gérald Gassiot-Talabot writes about discovering Antonio Berni’s work at the Venice Biennial, and describes the Ramona Montiel series. He speaks poetically about the artist’s Monsters, discussing the allegorical aspect of Berni’s production, [...]

Hugo Monzón welcomes León Ferrari to Buenos Aires on his return from exile. Monzón mentions the 1960s political art and Ferrari’s various forms of creative art making, describing his work by means of a concept: “module for repetition [...]

Kenneth Kemble wrote the introduction for his exhibition at the Galería Pizarro. He mentioned “1954” as the inception of his work with collages created with extra-pictorial materials. Kemble analyzed, as well, the use of tin and rusty metals, [...]

Adriana Valdés provides an in-depth review of Roser Bru’s body of work, arranged in three sections: “Materias” (Subjects), includes works produced since 1961, the year when she met Antoni Tàpies and started applying [...]

Rubén Vela writes about the relationship of Argentine artists to international art. He believes that Argentine artists are working on a purely aesthetic plane of creation. He studies the Juanito Laguna series in Antonio Berni’s work, previously [...]

Miguel Angel Rozzisi writes about Antonio Berni’s art as though it has overcome the decadence of the system. He maintains the existence of class warfare between the official culture and that of the people, with Berni as the representative for the [...]

French art critic Miguel Ragon writes about Antonio Berni’s engraving technique, as well as the question of narrative in his work with regard to the development of his chief characters: Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel [...]

Antonio Berni states his position on hyperrealism; he mentions the work of his surrealist stage in order relate the mechanisms of creation for photomontage and the collages from his Juanito Laguna series [...]

Horacio Safons reports on Antonio Berni’s exhibition at the Centro de Artes Visuales (Buenos Aires, 1965) at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, principally analyzing his Ramona Montiel series from a formal perspective and with regard to the nature of [...]

The critic Hugo Parpagnoli describes the ongoing condition of expression and the different processes undertaken by Kenneth Kemble throughout his career. In his opinion, Kemble’s recent works transform pre-manufactured objects into constituent [...]

Cayetano Córdova Iturburu wrote a highly favorable review of the exhibition by Kenneth Kemble at Galería Lirolay. He praised the artist’s ability and training and discussed the text found in the artist’s exhibition catalogue, in which he [...]

In this review, Roberto Guevara discusses the exhibition Más duquesas y majas de la calle Carabobo, pinturas, dibujos, collages y acuarelas de Diego Barboza (Caracas: Galería Félix, 1987). Guevara explains that Barboza has returned to painting and [...]

This document is an interview with Antonio Berni in which he describes the relationship between the landscapes he painted in the 1950s and the collages of his Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel series. He also comments on some aspects of his engraving [...]

In this interview, artist Antonio Berni explains his vision of North American culture, and contemporary art and techniques. He also speaks about his work in the print medium and his notion of realism [...]

Eduardo Zaldívar writes about the Antonio Berni exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, where the artist presented his series of prints on Ramona Montiel [...]

This article by the critic Roberto Guevara is about 1 x 9: color de la serigrafía, the exhibition of works by the artist Mercedes Pardo at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas. Guevara skims through the painter’s various earlier phases, and then [...]

In this essay, Hernández Rosselot claims that reality competes with art in Antonio Berni’s work. He writes about the materials Berni uses and reviews the collages in the Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel series. Rosselot goes on to compare Berni [...]

Hernández Rosselot writes about an interview he had with Kenneth Kemble at the artist’s exhibition at Galería Lirolay (December 1960). While interviewed, Kemble discusses his passion for music and points out the three paths of his work: collage, [...]

“Eclosiona un arte: acercamientos a la vida de Pedro Manrique Figueroa” [Emergence of an Art Form: Approaching the Life of Pedro Manrique Figueroa] by writer Lucas Ospina is the preface to the catalogue of Exposición de homenaje a Pedro Manrique [...]

This was an interdisciplinary poetry project produced by Nicanor Parra in 1952. Parra worked with Enrique Lihn and Alejandro Jodorowsky to create Quebrantahuesos, a sheet of paper measuring 55 x 40 centimeters which they covered with newspaper [...]

María Esther Vázquez interviews artists Antonio Berni and Raúl Soldi who speak of an artist’s commitment to his or her work, the opportunities that they came upon in their early careers, the risks faced by well-established artists, as well as [...]

According to the author of this text, the works by César Moro on exhibit are aggressively disconcerting; indeed, there is “nothing to say about ‘things’ so removed from mainstream painting.” The author points out that, at this time, the [...]

Roberto Jacoby — the conceptual artist, editor, and critic — analyzes León Ferrari’s work in terms of its political content and visual features, highlighting a number of aspects such as the relationship between the heretical and the erotic. He [...]

Argentine art critic Bernardo Graiver writes on the animated debates occasioned by the work of Antonio Berni, and proposes that it be reassessed. Graiver speaks of the nexus between aesthetics, ethics, and truth. He maintains that Berni’s work [...]

In this article, Justo Pastor Mellado explores the immediate connections that Nicanor Parra created for objectual (object-based) drawing in his Trabajos Prácticos series on the occasion of his exhibition in Madrid. The author raises [...]

In this text, the critic Juan Calzadilla develops his thoughts on the collages created by the Venezuelan painter Mateo Manaure. His analysis considers the start of the integration of photography into the visual arts in the early twentieth century. [...]

In this text, French critic Gaston Diehl discusses the work of Venezuelan painter Mateo Manaure, specifically the group of works featured in the show Collages held at Galería Cuatro Vientos in 1954. Diehl praises the small and “humble” works in [...]

In this article for The Daily Journal, Baiba Pecins writes about Mercedes Pardo on the occasion of the exhibition of her work at the GAN (Galería de Arte Nacional) in Caracas. The article is introduced by observations on luminosity and [...]

Ronald Kay published this collection of works by Nicanor Parra in News from Nowhere, in the only issue of Manuscritos magazine (Santiago: Departamento de Estudios Humanísticos, Universidad de Chile, 1975). Kay underscores the value of these [...]

In this short article, the Puerto Rican artist Roberto Alberty, also known as “el Bochio,” explains that he currently uses frottages [rubbings], collages, and photomontages in his work, adding that he uses cigarette ash to create the frottages. [...]

Kenneth Kemble responds to Hugo Parpagnoli’s questions about his preferences between artistic media and between painting and collage. In particular, Kemble discusses the creative process throughout his oeuvre [...]

The review predicts heated future discussions over the Bible collages series known as Biblia Gofrada [Embossed Bible] exhibited by the artist. The writer refers to works in the exhibition in which León Ferrari uses images by old Masters that worked [...]

The pamphlet for the solo show of works by Álvaro Barrios at the Galería Marta Traba includes a photo of the artist as a cutout figure; the document signed by the artist and the painter-witness Norman Mejía granting power to the art critic Marta [...]