Antonio Berni and his contemporaries
March 11 to May 16, 2005
Malba Coleccion Costantini
3415 Figueroa Alcorta Avenue
C1425CLA, Buenos Aires, Argentina
T 5411 4808 6500
F 5411 4808 6599
www.malba.org
Malba Coleccion Costantini is proud to present a major exhibition dedicated to the renowned Argentine artist Antonio Berni: Berni y sus contemporaneos. Correlatos [Berni and his Contemporaries. Correlates]. Curated by Adriana Lauria, the show contains one hundred works from public and private collections, featuring a dialogue between his work and the work of nineteen key local artists from the 1930s to the present.
Antonio Berni is perhaps the most studied and exhibited Argentine artist in the last 30 years, both in Argentina and in the international scene. Some of his works belong to private collections and institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA); the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston); the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas (Austin); the Musee des Beaux Arts de Ostende (Belgium); the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America (Washington DC), and the Musee d’Art de Saint-Denis (France), among others.
During the 30s, Berni was a key figure in the local avant-garde. In 1933, along with Alfredo Siqueiros and other artists, he took part in the making of a mural sited in the province of Buenos Aires. His later work was placed at the heart of contemporary art and its conjunction of Informalism, Pop and Hyperrealism. He experimented with object art, assemblage, the renewal of printmaking, installation and multimedia.
Berni and his Contemporaries. Correlates commemorates one of the most important Argentine artists. It is a great honor for Malba to have been chosen by his sons Lily and Jose Antonio to organize this major exhibition on the one hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth. Since the beginning, Malba has very much contributed to the knowledge of his work. Our collection includes eight key works by Berni, produced between 1930 and 1978: Susana y el viejo [Susana and the Old Man] 1931; Manifestacion [Public Demonstration], 1934; La mujer del sweater rojo [The Woman in the Red Sweater], 1935; La gran tentacion [The Great Temptation], 1962; and Chelsea Hotel, 1977, among others, states Eduardo F. Costantini (Jr.), Executive Director of Malba – Coleccion Costantini.
Berni’s celebrated Monstruos [Monsters] from the 60s are also in Malba’s collection, since December 2002, as part of the museum’s loan program. In 1967, they were shown in the exhibition Le monde en question at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and one of them, La sordidez [The Sordidness], was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2004.
The exhibition publication contains a hundred color reproductions; essays by Adriana Lauria, Marcelo Pacheco (Chief Curator of Malba), Gustavo Buntinx, Julio Sanchez and Cecilia Rabossi; comprehensive biographical data of Berni and the other artists, and an exhaustive bibliography. All texts are in Spanish and in English.
To purchase the catalogue, please visit Tiendamalba at www.malba.org.ar/web/latienda.php
or call 5411 4808 6550.
