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 Argentinean artist Mirtha Dermisache (1940–2012), was educated at both the Manuel Belgrano and the Prilidiano Pueyrredón Escuelas Nacionales de Bellas Artes and produced her first graphics book in 1966–67. From then on she continued to create visual artworks that included calligraphy. In books, letters, texts, diaries, and postcards, she explored the expressive possibilities of what Roland Barthes called “illegible writings” (1971), asemic lines that nonetheless approached the “essence of writing.” She was thus able to address a concept of originality using art as a language with the goal of “an art for everyone.”
Dermisache showed her work at several group events organized by the CAYC: Arte de Sistemas, Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires; From figuration art to systems art in argentina, Camden Arts Centre in London (both in 1971); Arte de Sistemas II, Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires (1972); Arte de Sistemas en Latinoamérica, the International Cultureel Centrum in Antwerp and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1974); the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, Italy, (1975); and the Vleeshal in Middelburg, the Netherlands (1975); and, the following year, Arte en cambio 76 in Buenos Aires.
In late 1971, Dermisache was one of the artists to whom Glusberg sent “invitation letters” to start the Grupo de los Trece; her reply is positive if ambiguous. (Archivo Mirtha Dermisache, Centro de Estudios Espigas-Tarea, Universidad de San Martín, Buenos Aires.) A preliminary list included her name as the only female member of the group; she is listed as a guest artist, not a member, at the III Bienal de Arte Coltejer in Medellín [GT-124 (doc. no. pending)]. When the CAYC presented its School for Higher Learning in 1973, Dermisache was listed as being in the communications area [GT-225 (doc. pending)].
