During the 1950s new abstract languages were being actively introduced in the Montevideo art world. Artists got together and formed new groups, driven by theoretical-abstract ideas that, though originally based on the visual art theory and practice of the maestro Joaquín Torres García (1874–1949), were now being influenced by foreign publications that brought news of the European avant-garde from thirty years earlier as well as the latest information from the Argentinean-Uruguayan concrete movement that was founded in the mid-1940s. Most of these new abstract artists in Uruguay were attuned to the new approaches that emerged after the Second World War and envisioned a “renewed utopia” in the fields of industry, graphics, and new technologies. Two such Uruguayan artists were José Pedro Costigliolo (1902–85) and María Freire (1917–2015).
This leaflet was produced as an invitation to the exhibition organized by the Comisión de Cultura del Centro de Estudiantes de Humanidades (Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias, Universidad de la República, Uruguay), an academic institution where the maestro Joaquín Torres García had also given lectures. The leaflet includes reproductions of various abstract works, still in embryonic stages of development. In some of these works the viewer can see gestural brushstrokes applied in the modernist pictorial tradition—for example, in works by Américo Spósito (1924–2005) and by Oscar García Reino (1910–93). Other works reflect a more conceptual version of abstraction that is closer to the concrete approach favored by important exponents in Argentina and Brazil (including the Uruguayans Costigliolo, María Freire, and others).