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.
The exhibition Gráficos argentinos ‘74, which was organized in early 1974 and presented in the exhibition rooms at the Illinois Bell Telephone Company 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.
The list of participating artists includes some who worked with the center on a regular basis, such as Jacques Bedel and Luis Fernando Benedit—both of whom were members of the Grupo de los Trece—and Nicolás García Uriburu. Others were included for the first time in this overseas event: Pablo Obelar, Sergio Camporeale, Delia Cugat, and Daniel Zelaya, who were members of the Grabas group. These new additions to the roster of participants showed that the CAYC was reaching out to include the figurative trends (realism, Neo-Surrealism, and Photorealism, among others) that were emerging at that time at major international competitions such as the V Documenta Kassel (1972) and the Paris Biennial (1971). Events of that nature were soon matched in Argentina: the Panorama de la pintura argentina joven (1971) was presented by the Fundación Lorenzutti at the Museo de Arte Moderno, and the “Marcelo De Ridder” (1973–77) and “Benson & Hedges” (1977–84) competitions were both directed by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.
