www.florencebiennale.org:
The Florence Biennale confers to Marta Minujàn the 'Lorenzo il Magnifico' Lifetime Achievement Award 2015 as a tribute to her outstanding artistic research, aimed at bringing ideas into reality through a continuous experimentation of materials and techniques. All this with a view to engage the audience in the process of creating ephemeral works such as happenings, installations, and performances, so that everyone involved could experience the essence of art.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1943, Marta Minujàn lives and works in the capital of Argentina. To orient herself in her artistic path she has always kept looking at an ideal 'fixed star', the encounter with the audience through her work, regardless of the medium to employ. All this with a search of perfection, which is a value in performing arts, and which is a trait that Marta Minujàn has in common with excellences such as Sylvie Guillem, for instance.
Marta realised to have an artistic flair at the age of ten, studying fine arts two years later. In 1959, while she was still a student at the Istituto Universitario de Arte, she debuted at the Teatro Agón in Buenos Aires, and was awarded the 1st Prize from the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina. In 1960 she met Alberto Greco (1931-1965), painter, poet, and founder of the Argentinian Informalism. That current allured Marta, and yet induced her to set painting aside.
That same year, thanks to a grant received from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, she was one of the thirty young Argentinian artists taking part to the exhibition 'Pablo Curatella Manes et trente argentines de la nouvelle génération' at the Galérie Creuze in Paris. In the French capital Marta got involved in the avant-garde art scene, and was influenced by Neorealism. Nonetheless, she developed her own mode of artistic expression '' encompassing different materials, themes, and bewildering environments with elements having a strong impact on perception and emotion '' aimed at triggering an immediateom the audience. A striking example of that approach is the Chambre d'amour (Love Room), created with Mark Brusse in 1963.
That year marks the end of Marta's three-year sojourn in Paris and La Destrucción (The Destruction) of the works that she had made during period ('to create by destroying').
From that 'action', which she carried out with the aid of a group of artists invited to destroy her works (Christo, Élie-Charles, Flamand, Lourdes Castro, Mariano Hernández and Paul Gette), Marta Minujàn conceived her notion of happening. Thirty years later, remembering La Destrucción, which that ideally brought together birth and death within a cycle of life and creativity, Marta would affirm that 'the work of art is the instant in which a person lives, and not the thing. It is the happening in its development rather than forms, which keep being accessorial. By no way can the art of a society that is constantly changing be a static image'.
www.visualdiplomacyusa.blogspot.com:
is an Argentine conceptual and performance artist.She was born in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. As a student in the National University Art Institute, she first exhibited her work in a 1959 show at the Teatro Agón. A scholarship from the National Arts Foundation allowed her to travel to Paris as one of the young Argentine artists featured in Pablo Curatella Manes and Thirty Argentines of the New Generation, a 1960 exhibit organized by the prominent sculptor and Paris Biennale judge.
Her time in Paris inspired her to create"livable sculptures," notably La Destrucción, in which she assembled mattresses along the Impasse Roussin, only to invite other avant-garde artists in her entourage, including Christo and Paul-Armand Gette, to destroy the display. This 1963 creation would be the first of her"Happenings" '' events as works of arts in themselves; among her hosts during her stay was Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (later President of France).
She joined Rubén Santantonàn at the di Tella Institute in 1965 to create La Menesunda (Mayhem), where participants were asked to go through sixteen chambers, each separated by a human-shaped entry. Led by neon lights, groups of eight visitors would encounter rooms with television sets at full blast, couples making love in bed, a cosmetics counter (complete with an attendant), a dental office from which dialing an oversized rotary phone was required to leave, a walk-in freezer with dangling fabrics (suggesting sides of beef), and a mirrored room with black lighting, falling confetti, and the scent of frying food. The use of advertising throughout suggested the influence of pop art in Minuj"mayhem."
These works earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, by which she relocated to New York City. The coup d'état by General Juan Carlos Onganàa in June of that year made her fellowship all the more fortuitous, as the new regime would frequently censor and ban irreverent displays such as hers. Minujàn delved into psychedelic art in New York, of which among her best-known creations was that of "Minuphone," where patrons could enter a telephone booth, dial a number, and be surprised by colors projecting from the glass panels, sounds, and seeing themselves on a television screen in the floor.
She returned to Argentina in 1976, and afterwards created a series of reproductions of classical Greek sculptures in plaster of paris, as well as miniatures of the Buenos Aires Obelisk carved out of panettone, of the Venus de Milo carved from cheese, and of Tango vocalist Carlos Gardel for a 1981 display in Medellàn. The latter, a sheet metal creation, was stuffed with cotton and lit, creating a metaphor for the legendary crooner's untimely 1935 death in a Medellàn plane crash.
The return of democracy in 1983, following seven years of a generally failed dictatorship, prompted Minujàn to create a monument to a glaring, inanimate victim of the regime: freedom of expression. Assembling 30,000 banned books, she designed "Parthenon of Books," and following President Raúl Alfonsàn's December 10 inaugural, had it mounted on a boulevard median along the Ninth of July Avenue.
Minujàn has continued to display her art pieces and happenings in the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, the National Fine Arts Museum, the ArteBA contemporary art festival Buenos Aires, the Barbican Center, and a vast number of other international galleries and art shows, while continuing to satirize consumer culture.
The Florence Biennale confers to Marta Minujàn the 'Lorenzo il Magnifico' Lifetime Achievement Award 2015 as a tribute to her outstanding artistic research, aimed at bringing ideas into reality through a continuous experimentation of materials and techniques. All this with a view to engage the audience in the process of creating ephemeral works such as happenings, installations, and performances, so that everyone involved could experience the essence of art.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1943, Marta Minujàn lives and works in the capital of Argentina. To orient herself in her artistic path she has always kept looking at an ideal 'fixed star', the encounter with the audience through her work, regardless of the medium to employ. All this with a search of perfection, which is a value in performing arts, and which is a trait that Marta Minujàn has in common with excellences such as Sylvie Guillem, for instance.
Marta realised to have an artistic flair at the age of ten, studying fine arts two years later. In 1959, while she was still a student at the Istituto Universitario de Arte, she debuted at the Teatro Agón in Buenos Aires, and was awarded the 1st Prize from the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina. In 1960 she met Alberto Greco (1931-1965), painter, poet, and founder of the Argentinian Informalism. That current allured Marta, and yet induced her to set painting aside.
That same year, thanks to a grant received from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, she was one of the thirty young Argentinian artists taking part to the exhibition 'Pablo Curatella Manes et trente argentines de la nouvelle génération' at the Galérie Creuze in Paris. In the French capital Marta got involved in the avant-garde art scene, and was influenced by Neorealism. Nonetheless, she developed her own mode of artistic expression '' encompassing different materials, themes, and bewildering environments with elements having a strong impact on perception and emotion '' aimed at triggering an immediateom the audience. A striking example of that approach is the Chambre d'amour (Love Room), created with Mark Brusse in 1963.
That year marks the end of Marta's three-year sojourn in Paris and La Destrucción (The Destruction) of the works that she had made during period ('to create by destroying').
From that 'action', which she carried out with the aid of a group of artists invited to destroy her works (Christo, Élie-Charles, Flamand, Lourdes Castro, Mariano Hernández and Paul Gette), Marta Minujàn conceived her notion of happening. Thirty years later, remembering La Destrucción, which that ideally brought together birth and death within a cycle of life and creativity, Marta would affirm that 'the work of art is the instant in which a person lives, and not the thing. It is the happening in its development rather than forms, which keep being accessorial. By no way can the art of a society that is constantly changing be a static image'.
www.visualdiplomacyusa.blogspot.com:
is an Argentine conceptual and performance artist.She was born in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. As a student in the National University Art Institute, she first exhibited her work in a 1959 show at the Teatro Agón. A scholarship from the National Arts Foundation allowed her to travel to Paris as one of the young Argentine artists featured in Pablo Curatella Manes and Thirty Argentines of the New Generation, a 1960 exhibit organized by the prominent sculptor and Paris Biennale judge.
Her time in Paris inspired her to create"livable sculptures," notably La Destrucción, in which she assembled mattresses along the Impasse Roussin, only to invite other avant-garde artists in her entourage, including Christo and Paul-Armand Gette, to destroy the display. This 1963 creation would be the first of her"Happenings" '' events as works of arts in themselves; among her hosts during her stay was Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (later President of France).
She joined Rubén Santantonàn at the di Tella Institute in 1965 to create La Menesunda (Mayhem), where participants were asked to go through sixteen chambers, each separated by a human-shaped entry. Led by neon lights, groups of eight visitors would encounter rooms with television sets at full blast, couples making love in bed, a cosmetics counter (complete with an attendant), a dental office from which dialing an oversized rotary phone was required to leave, a walk-in freezer with dangling fabrics (suggesting sides of beef), and a mirrored room with black lighting, falling confetti, and the scent of frying food. The use of advertising throughout suggested the influence of pop art in Minuj"mayhem."
These works earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, by which she relocated to New York City. The coup d'état by General Juan Carlos Onganàa in June of that year made her fellowship all the more fortuitous, as the new regime would frequently censor and ban irreverent displays such as hers. Minujàn delved into psychedelic art in New York, of which among her best-known creations was that of "Minuphone," where patrons could enter a telephone booth, dial a number, and be surprised by colors projecting from the glass panels, sounds, and seeing themselves on a television screen in the floor.
She returned to Argentina in 1976, and afterwards created a series of reproductions of classical Greek sculptures in plaster of paris, as well as miniatures of the Buenos Aires Obelisk carved out of panettone, of the Venus de Milo carved from cheese, and of Tango vocalist Carlos Gardel for a 1981 display in Medellàn. The latter, a sheet metal creation, was stuffed with cotton and lit, creating a metaphor for the legendary crooner's untimely 1935 death in a Medellàn plane crash.
The return of democracy in 1983, following seven years of a generally failed dictatorship, prompted Minujàn to create a monument to a glaring, inanimate victim of the regime: freedom of expression. Assembling 30,000 banned books, she designed "Parthenon of Books," and following President Raúl Alfonsàn's December 10 inaugural, had it mounted on a boulevard median along the Ninth of July Avenue.
Minujàn has continued to display her art pieces and happenings in the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, the National Fine Arts Museum, the ArteBA contemporary art festival Buenos Aires, the Barbican Center, and a vast number of other international galleries and art shows, while continuing to satirize consumer culture.