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.
Tuvia Katz (b. 1936) was born in Poland. Threatened by Nazi persecution, his family decided to flee from Europe and settled in Argentina the year he was born. In the mid-1950s he studied drawing and painting with Demetrio Urruchúa. In 1960 he emigrated to Israel and settled in the Kibbutz Hokuk where he continued to pursue his art career. He lived in Brazil from 1976 to 1978, then settled permanently in Jerusalem in 1979, where he studied to become a rabbi. He later ran programs that combined art and faith.
The image in the newsletter shows a photograph of the artist and some information in what appears to be a reproduction of his passport or ID. The address provided indicates that he lived in Israel, as confirmed by inscriptions in Hebrew. Under that, the freehand sketch includes Spanish words related to rayuela (hopscotch), the child’s game. It is probably a reference to Rayuela (1963), the famous novel by the Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar, a paradigmatic work from the so-called “boom” in Latin American literature. In this case, however, Katz includes the phrase “beyond the grave” over the word “sky” (or “heaven”), indicating that “his” hopscotch refers to his religious path.
