Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
Sol LeWitt showed his work at group exhibitions at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (1967) and at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (1968); the CAYC subsequently organized this retrospective of his production in La Plata in May 1973. Beginning in the early days of his career, LeWitt treated books (direct referents of Conceptual art and Minimalism) as an important medium and, from that point on, used drawings and publications as supports and alternative means of distribution for his ideas. In fact, the works in his Serial Project demonstrate his Conceptual approach in an almost endless succession of constructive sketches in which he addresses “the system” so that viewers might be able to understand the sequential process involved in creating the structure as a whole.
In the mid-1960s, in a move that was closely associated with the Minimalist movement, the estructuras primarias were presented in Buenos Aires. Artists who worked in that geometric style relied on modular, industrial elements and highly simplified forms, thus eliminating any kind of “visual anecdote.” A number of exhibitions in 1967 provided the so-called “primary structures” with the seal of legitimacy from institutions that were part of the modernizing trend in Argentina. One of them, La visión elemental, shown at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, included local artists who were deeply committed to this approach. Another was Estructuras Primarias II, at the Sociedad Hebraica. The latter exhibition, which Glusberg organized, was presented as the second part of Primary Structures, an event that had taken place earlier that year (1967) at the Jewish Museum in New York and included works by LeWitt.
