Camnitzer at the Barrio Museum

New York: A retrospective exhibition of Uruguayan conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer is being displayed (through May 29) at the Barrio Museum: -70 works made in the past 44 years.

The exhibition –mostly made up of works from Daros-Latin America museum’s permanent collection, based in Zurich, commissioned by Hans-Michael Herzog and Katrin Steffen–, was previously admired in the Swiss city; and, after New York, it’ll be taken to Mexico and countries in the region.

It is Camnitzer’s fourth exhibition in this institution which, in 1983 showcased his Serie de tortura uruguaya; in 1995: Amanaplanacanalpanama, and in 2007: Los desaparecidos.

There are two works included in this exhibition where Camnitzer directly criticizes art and its functions, and he explores the relation among images, objects and texts: the emblematic “Plusvalia”, and “Firma por tajadas”.

Luis Camnitzer was born in 1937, Lübeck, Germany, when he was fourteen months his family moved to Uruguay, and he has lived in New York during the past 47 years. He studied sculpture and architecture at the University of Uruguay Republic and he later studied sculpture and engraving at the Academy of Munich. In 1965 he founded the New York Graphic Workshop along with artists Jose Guillermo Castillo and Liliana Porter, and he played a leading role in local organizations such as the Latin American Museum and the Movement for America’s Cultural Independence (MICLA). He’s worked as emeritus professor at the University of New York since 1969.

His work has been exhibited in the US, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay and Germany. He has participated in important collective exhibitions such as: Versiones del sur (2000-2001) carried out at the MNCARS in Madrid, and Face à l´histoire (1996), at Pompidou Center in Paris. Other retrospectives have been showcased at the Lehman College Art Gallery in New York (1991), the Fine Arts Museum in Montevideo, Uruguay (1986) and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San Jose, Costa Rica (2007).

The 7^th edition of our Arte por Excelencias magazine (a. II, no. 7, 2010, pp. 8-19 Spanish and English) includes a text written by artist and art critic Antonio Eligio (Tonel), and the cover is privileged by the inclusion of Camnitzer’s work “Two Identical Objects” (Billete de banco y papel periodico, 1981), from the Daros-Latin America Collection.

In the text (“Luis Camnitzer, the hand holding the horizon”), Tonel comments on Camnitzer’s multiple facets: “His international projection as artist, historian and art critic, pedagogue, polemist, exhibition commissioner, editor, member of juries and panels, has turned him into an ubiquitous figure, familiar and influential –sometimes I think it’s all much to his regret. We’re talking about a creator who is backed up by a six-decade career, author of a wide and open work, in which humor and lightness walk along with the philosophical reflection, skepticism and harsh sense. Along with that work, in constant reciprocity with it, the author possesses heterodox ideas on art teaching and learning, plus a caudal of annotations and reflections on art itself, particularly on oscillations, tensions, the Third World and Latin American artist’s idle pursuits within an imperial metropolis.”