Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) Presents Ricardo Garabito

Written by Malcolm Walker Sunday, 31 July 2011 22:01

Buenos Aires.- The Museo de Arte Latinoamerican and Fundación Costantini is proud to present "Ricardo Garabito: Paintings and Drawings" on view at the museum through August 29th. The exhibition presents a selection of historical drawings and recent paintings by the artist Ricardo Garabito (Trenque Lauquen, 1930), a major figure in 20th century art from Argentina.  The show includes thirty-two drawings produced between 1972 and 1982, works largely unknown to the viewing public because they have only been exhibited once before, in 1980 at the Ática Gallery. The central theme of these highly comic and ironic portraits on paper in an array of techniques (pencil, tempera and watercolor) is the human figure. The exhibition also includes a group of fifteen oil paintings created from 1998 to 2011; these works include still lifes and themes taken from daily life.

The drawings and paintings by Garabito included in the exhibition make reference to common faces and seemingly irrelevant objects that are transformed by the artist’s vision. “In his drawings and paintings, what appears to be explicit is a means to say something else, a key to open the gate to a closed imagination, so that what we see only vaguely due to the negligence born of habit grows sharper and tells us that ‘everything’ can be seen differently (discovered), with greater pleasure and intensity,” states the artist Juan Carlos Distéfano. Garabito dwells on the gesture, which he comes to after close observation of nature and human behavior. In the words of Samuel Oliver –former director of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and a friend of the artist-, these are imaginary portraits of persons we can identify. “His models are those strangers who tend to surround us, who walk beside us and leave their essence on the artist’s eye, as if filtered through a net. The artist understands and does not judge them. At most, he teases them a little, enacting a peculiar humor,” explains Oliver in the text reproduced in the catalogue to this exhibition. In a certain way, Garabito’s drawings partake of journalistic photography with its shots that surprise the model. “His drawing is rational due to its technique, imaginative due to the elements it combines, and documentary because it speaks of a topic from these times. Drawing par excellence,” Oliver adds. Samuel Paz –who, like Oliver, was an important critic and mentor of Garabito– wrote that the humorous figures that Garabito portrayed, with their specifically Buenos Aires brand of the picaresque, awakened in the viewer a justified suspicion that he himself was object of the irony. In Garabito´s still lifes, on the other hand, the silence of the space and the immanent power of everyday objects prevail. “If these still lifes are marked by meditation and control, the sculptural forms tend towards an unbridledly sensual Surrealism,” explained Paz in 1998, on the occasion of the anthological exhibition at the Centro Cultural Recoleta.


In 2007, Samuel Paz and Victoria Noorthoorn co-curated a major retrospective of Garabito’s work at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Far from passing trends, Garabito draws the signs that narrate the world without obeying any external imposition. “In his production, his only desire is to ‘make’ and the hand that heeds that mandate,” Distéfano concludes.

Ricardo Garabito is an Argentine artist, drawer, painter and teacher, he was born in Trenque Lauquen in 1930. At the age of eighteen, he moved to Buenos Aires, where he currently lives and works in his studio in the neighborhood of Monserrat. In the early 1950s, he frequented the Asociación Estímulo de Bellas Artes, and from 1953 to 1956 he took studio classes with Horacio Butler. That is where he met Samuel Paz who, along with Samuel Oliver, would be his primary critic and mentor. In 1963, the first solo exhibition of his work was held at the Rubbers Gallery and since then he has participated in numerous group shows in Argentina and abroad. There have been only eleven solo exhibitions of his work, including an anthological show at the Fundación San Telmo (1982); an exhibition in the Cronopios Gallery of the Centro Cultural Recoleta (1998), and a major retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (2007), which was curated by Samuel Paz and Victoria Noorthoorn and featured more than one hundred works produced from the 1960s to the present. His work forms part of the collections of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Collection of the Banco de la República de Colombia, among others.


With an impressive unique permanent collection and a continuous stream of new and exciting temporary exhibitions, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) should be at the top of the list for art lovers visiting Argentina’s capital. The museum was created by the Eduardo F. Constantini Foundation as a not-for-profit museum to display (and build on) the collection donated by Eduardo F. Constantini. Since its founding in 2001, The Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires has dedicated itself to the preservation, dissemination, and integration of modern and contemporary Latin American art worldwide. Fundación Costantini, in its dedication to 20th century Latin American art, owns a unique collection that includes the principal tendencies and movements that characterize the region’s art in all its mediums, bringing together paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings, collages, photographs, installations and artists’ objects from Mexico and the Caribbean to Argentina. Located on the tranquil and historic Avenida Figueroa Alcorta in Palermo, Buenos Aires, and close to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the MALBA building was constructed to blend in with its surroundings and encourage a natural interaction between its visitors and the art it showcases. Designed by renowned local architects AFT (Atelman, Fourcade & Tapia), the stunning building provides an airy and luminescent environment, with sectional yet fluid gallery spaces. Visitors seamlessly transition from one period or style of art to the next, the lighting changing throughout the building to best suit the art on display. The mission of the MALBA is to stimulate interest in and knowledge of Latin American art. To achieve this, the museum maintains a dynamic cultural center which serves to constantly highlight and expose the collection, a program of high-quality temporary exhibitions and a library of Latin American films (shown in the museum's theatre Tuesday through Saturday). MALBA also hosts meetings, classes, lectures and seminars with authors and artists. The museum's terrace restaurant and cafe is very highly regarded. Celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2011, the MALBA is already visited by almost 1.5 million people every year. Visit the museum's website at ... www.malba.org.ar

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~