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 an important role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists provided an introduction to the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
The exhibition Gráficos argentinos ‘74, which was organized in early 1974 and presented at the Illinois Bell Telephone Company’s headquarters in Chicago, was one of the many initiatives undertaken by the CAYC to display Argentinean art on the international stage. This particular show, presented in the United States, featured artists who explored a range of different printmaking techniques to create their works. It should be noted that Chicago is a city with a long tradition in this particular field. [See GT-357 (doc. no. 1476511) and GT-449 (doc. no. 1476544)]. The list of participating artists at the French festival includes some who regularly teamed up with the center, such as Horacio Zabala and Luis Fernando Benedit (both of whom were members of the Grupo de los Trece) and Edgardo Antonio Vigo. Other names, however, appear for the first time: Pablo Obelar, Sergio Camporeale, Delia Cugat, and Daniel Zelaya, all of whom were members of the Grupo Grabas.
These new artist additions demonstrated how the CAYC was reaching out to include the figurative trends (realism, Neo-Surrealism, and Photorealism, among others) that were being shown at that time at major international competitions such as the Paris Biennale (1971) and documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972). Events of that nature were soon matched in Buenos Aires at the Panorama de la pintura argentina joven (1971), presented by the Fundación Lorenzutti at the Museo de Arte Moderno, and the Marcelo De Ridder (1973–77) and Benson & Hedges (1977–84) competitions, which were both organized by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires.
