A retrospective of 55 works at Bellas Artes
The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes opens a retrospective of the Argentine painter Rómulo Macciò, who lived from 1931 to 2016, on Friday at 7 pm. The show is titled La pintura como destino (Painting as Destiny) and covers his output from 1960 to 2016. It is set up in the museum's temporary exhibitions pavilion, on Avenida del Libertador, in Buenos Aires.
There are 55 pieces in very different formats: large oils and acrylics, drawings, tempera works, altered photographs and small sculptures. Florencia Battiti is the curator, and the layout of the gallery is by the artist and architect Juan José Cambre. The pieces come from the Bellas Artes collection and from other collections.
Among the canvases from the museum's holdings are Falsa visión, from 1961, and La momia, from 1963, which won the international painting award at the Torcuato Di Tella Institute. The public will also see for the first time a group of tempera works from around 1970 that the museum added to its collection in recent years.
Who Macciò is and what he sought in painting
Self-taught, Macciò worked early on in advertising and graphic design, and held his first show in Buenos Aires in 1956. In the early 1960s he was part of the group Otra Figuración, with three colleagues: Jorge de la Vega, Ernesto Deira and Luis Felipe Noé. That group questioned the line between figuration and abstraction and was a chapter of renewal for Argentine art.
The Galería Peuser hosted, in 1961, his first group show, and there the four proposed another way of approaching the human figure. That stage, however, was only one part of a longer career made of searches and changes. His work is recognised by sensual color and distorted figures, with an intense range in which red, blue, violet and yellow dominate. Fragmented faces, lips, eyes and unsettling silhouettes return across the canvases.
Big cities had a central place: Rome, Venice, New York and Buenos Aires appear in a good share of his output. About his New York paintings, Macciò himself said that the visual side caught his attention and that he began to paint in an objective way. In his words to Clarín: “I painted what I saw”.
What the museum and the curator say
The artist's link with the institution goes back a long way. According to Clarín, it began in 1963, with the show of the group Otra Figuración, and ran until 2007, when the museum presented the retrospective Retratos y lugares (Portraits and Places).
The museum's director, Andrés Duprat, said the exhibition renews the dialogue between the master and the history of the house. He valued how Macciò insisted on the craft of painting and on the human figure as an axis, and also the landscapes and altered photographs of his last creative period.
Battiti, for her part, placed the drive of the work in the 1960s, a decade of formal ruptures and experimentation. According to the curator, over more than five decades the artist kept adjusting his painterly register to each subject. She described him as a citizen of the world and a metropolitan flâneur, a sensitive witness to the cities he lived in or visited.
In 1967 Macciò took the top award of the Salón Nacional de Artes Plásticas, the Premio de Honor. He was part of the Argentine delegation at the São Paulo Biennial (1963 and 1985) and at Venice (1968 and 1988). There are works by him at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York and at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, among other collections.
If you go
The opening is on Friday at 7 pm in the temporary exhibitions pavilion of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, at Avenida del Libertador 1473, in the city of Buenos Aires. The show stays open until February 14, 2027, so there are more than three months to see it.
Clarín did not report the ticket price or the visiting days and hours, so it is worth confirming them with the museum before heading out. The backing for the show comes from Amigos del Bellas Artes.
Source: Clarín
Stories worth sharing.
