07.13 — 08.29.2011
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.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Malba has published a 76-page bilingual (Spanish and English) catalogue that includes the text “Garabito: la desmesura de lo mínimo” [The Immensity of the Minimal], written by artist Juan Carlos Distéfano; fragments of the text by Samuel Oliver published in the catalogue of the group exhibition Premio Benson & Hedges al Nuevo Grabado y Pintura en Argentina (MNBA, Buenos Aires, 1978), and the wall text written by Samuel Paz for Garabito´s solo anthological exhibition at the Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires, 1998). The catalogue also includes the artist’s biography and color reproductions of the works exhibited.
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.
Ricardo Garabito
Argentine artist, illustrator, painter, and teacher. Born in Trenque Lauquen in 1930, he moved to Buenos Aires at the age of 18, where he currently lives and works in his studio in the Monserrat neighborhood.
In the early 1950s, he frequented the Asociación Estímulo de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts Encouragement Association), and between 1953 and 1956 he attended Horacio Butler's workshop. There he met Samuel Paz who, together with Samuel Oliver, would become a critical reference and mentor for his work. In 1963, he held his first solo exhibition at the Rubbers Gallery, and since then he has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Argentina and abroad. He held only eleven solo exhibitions, including anthological exhibitions at the San Telmo Foundation (1982) and the Cronopios Hall of the Recoleta Cultural Center (1998), in addition to his major retrospective in 2007 at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, curated by Samuel Paz and Victoria Noorthoorn, which brought together more than one hundred works by the artist, from the 1960s to the present.
Sus obras integran el patrimonio del Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art The University of Texas at Austin y la Colección de Arte del Banco de la República de Colombia, entre otras colecciones públicas y privadas del país y del exterior.
