BORN OF INFORMALISMO: MARTA MINUJÍN AND THE NASCENT BODY OF PERFORMANCE
The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) announced the opening of Born of Informalismo: Marta Minujín and the Nascent Body of Performance, curated by Michaëla de Lacaze Mohrmann. The third in a series of exhibitions on Latin American modernism and its legacies, this show examines the early work of trailblazing Argentine artist Marta Minujín (b. 1943), tracing her trajectory from informalist painting and sculpture to performance.
Presenting three of Minujín's informalist paintings alongside exhibition catalogues, photographs of sculptures, and documentation of her 1963 happening La destrucción, this exhibition highlights Informalismo's importance as a key conduit for Argentine experimental art of the 1960s. Whereas many accounts of the movement have focused on the production of a small contingent of male artists, this show encourages a reconsideration of Informalismo's heterogeneity, transnational context, and sociopolitical framework through Minujín's work, paving the way for additional research into its role in twentieth-century Latin American art.
A form of expressive abstraction characterized by the gestural application of paint, informalist painting emerged in Europe in the late 1940s and gradually flourished around the globe. By 1956, it had taken hold in Buenos Aires, where its proponents produced relief-like paintings that incorporated a somber color palette and the extra-artistic materials of everyday life, from rags to rusted cans. Evocative of the harsh realities of daily life and a general postwar malaise, Argentine Informalismo embraced ugliness, spontaneity, violence, and irrationality in a decisive break with the mathematically precise logic of the country's preceding avant-gardes.
For Minujín, who adopted Informalismo's lexicon of earthy colors, found items, and textural impastos to convey the passage of time, the style offered a crucial platform for testing out ideas regarding the body and action in art. Paintings such as Gran mancha (ca. 1959), Mancha (1960), and Homenaje a Greco (1961), composed of thick layers of smeared and speckled oils, evince the effects of aging through their cracked skin-like surfaces. Minujín's subsequent informalist sculptures of the early 1960s marked a transition into three dimensions by constructing discarded mattresses and cardboard into fragile anthropomorphic and embodied forms.
These experiments in painting and sculpture coincided with Minujín's early performances, setting the stage for her first full-scale happening, La destrucción—a pivotal piece, produced in Paris, in which she destroyed her sculptures in a ceremonial conflagration. Minujín abandoned the informalist idiom in 1963, going on to produce groundbreaking work in installation, performance, and time-based media—from La menesunda to Simultaneidad en simultaneidad—in the following years.
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Unidentified photographer, Photograph of untitled sculpture from Marta Minujín's Cartones (Cardboards) series, 1961–62. Courtesy Marta Minujín Archive
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Unidentified photographer, Photograph of Marta Minujín with one of her sculptures shown in El hombre antes del hombre: exposición de cosas (Man Before Man: Exhibition of Things), 1962. Courtesy Marta Minujín Archive
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Harry Shunk and János Kender, Photograph of La destrucción (The Destruction) by Marta Minujín, 1963. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20)
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Harry Shunk and János Kender, Photograph of La destrucción (The Destruction) by Marta Minujín, 1963. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20)
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Unidentified photographer, Photograph of Marta Minujín with her sculptures from Eróticos en Technicolor (Erotica in Technicolor) in her Paris studio, 1963. © Marta Minujín Archive
Until June 3rd, 2022
Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)
50 East 78th Street. New York, New York 10075
United States
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