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 del Rio de la Plata (Graphic Artists from the River Plate Region) included works by Argentinean, Brazilian, Paraguayan, and Uruguayan artists. The exception was Julio Plaza who, though born in Madrid, Spain, spent most of his working life in São Paulo. This exhibition at the Galerie S:T Petri in Lund, Sweden, was one of the CAYC’s many initiatives designed to introduce Latin American art in European art circles.
The title of the exhibition and its overall approach were reminiscent of Gráficos argentinos ‘74, the event presented earlier that year at the Illinois Bell Telephone Company in Chicago (GT-357 [doc. no. 1476511]) and, later, at the Sigma Festival in Bordeaux, France (GT-460 [doc. no. 1476859]). But the list of participating artists varied from one event to another; some of them were already regular contributors to the center, such as Horacio Zabala and Luis Fernando Benedit (both of whom were members of the Grupo de los Trece). On this occasion, the list also included Julio Plaza, Regina Silveira, and Regina Vater, who had shown their work at solo exhibition at the CAYC earlier that same year (see GT-525 [doc. no. 1476852], GT-526 [doc. no. 1476849], and GT-539 [doc. no. 1476855]).
The works that were selected and published in the newsletter showed that 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 documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972) and the Paris Biennale (1971). 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, both of which were organized by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires.
The Galerie S:T Petri was founded by the French artist Jean Sellem (b. 1941), who was a professor of art history at the University of Lund at the time. The gallery specialized in Conceptual and performance art, and often showed works by members of the international movement known as Fluxus.
