BUENOS AIRES - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART PRESENTS ALBERTO GRECO: YOU ARE GREAT!

From the beginning of her management as director of this museum, Victoria Noorthoorn longed to present an exhibition that, from an authorial perspective and from the South, would offer the public a living and present Greco. Thus it was that a strong group synergy was produced between the research developed by Marcelo E. Pacheco and María Amalia García, which materialized in 2016 with the homonymous book Alberto Greco: ¡Qué grande sos!, and the incorporation of Javier Villa, senior curator from the Museum, the Museum’s group of curators, together with the museum designers Daniela Thomas and Felipe Tassara, based in São Paulo, and Iván Rösler, from the Museum too. “Under the gaze of this great team, the museum room becomes the stage; Paintings and drawings free themselves from the notion of the fetish and help to present Greco in motion, inaugurating a new way of bringing his life and his work closer to young people who did not know him”, says Noorthoorn.

As one of the catalyst figures of contemporary art in Argentina, Alberto Greco (Buenos Aires, 1931 - Barcelona, ​​1965) was a central artist in the rapid transformations that took place in the passage from informalist painting to object and action, through which he generated a great opening of the artistic horizon for all the decades that followed.

In this staging that will exhibit more than 100 central pieces of Alberto Greco's legacy, a selection of his works, archival reconstructions and “blind episodes” are included. For these last works or key actions of Greco's artistic development that have only remained in the memory of witnesses and of which there is no visual record, the Moderno Greco team called on very diverse contemporary Argentine artists to recreate them through works and actions that are included in the exhibition with the intention of showing a living Greco still present in the cultural community. The participating artists are: Joaquín Aras, Guillermina Etkin, Sebastián Gordín, Daniel Leber, Agustina Muñoz and Paula Pellejero.

Alberto Greco was an irreverent and scathing artist who questioned social mandates and cultural conventions. In less than ten years he revolutionized the art world by dismantling the logic that had prevailed until then. He overflowed the limits of the painting and expanded the frontiers of art by reconquering public space. With the idea of ​​refounding reality as an adventure that deserved to be perceived again, he began to mark people by surrounding them with a chalk circle and to sign them as works of art; He called this type of action "vivo-ditos." Thus, Greco transformed the most diverse urban and rural situations into new supports for experimentation and expanded the circulation of art to new audiences.

Through constant experimentation, Greco sought to de-hierarchize art, dissolve it in reality and merge it with life. From the Rolling Exhibition of Argentine Art, in 1960, in which he exhibited paintings and sculptures in the squares of Cuyo towns, to the raffle of works that he organized in the lockers of New York's central station, in 1965, Greco was an nomad artist who with his movement generated community. During his short life, he participated in the cultural scenes of São Paulo, Paris, Rome, Madrid, New York and Barcelona, ​​in addition to Buenos Aires. Although he was immersed in a cosmopolitan and international panorama, he never neglected the impact that Argentine culture had on his thinking; tango and popular customs run through his artistic production.