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.
Pierre Restany (1930–2003) was an influential critic and curator; he was involved with the avant-garde movements of the 1960s, especially nouveau réalisme (new realism), a trend that, in France, provided a counterpoint to the Abstract Expressionism championed by Clement Greenberg. According to its manifesto (1960), the goal of the trend was to challenge traditional mediums, starting with conventional painting (oil on canvas), and encourage experimental explorations in search of “a new expressive reality.” Restany’s visits to Buenos Aires were orchestrated by Argentinean institutions that sought to modernize the local art scene, such as the ITDT (Instituto Torcuato Di Tella), which invited him to sit on the jury at the national and international competitions that took place in 1964. Later, the CAYC also invited him to take part in its activities. This newsletter, dated August 1975, announces the opening of an exhibition organized by Restany at the CAYC that included the latest works produced by French artists at the time.
In the late 1960s, Restany focused his attention on the sociological structures of contemporary art, urbanism, and the relationships among art objects and the mass-produced objects churned out by our postindustrial society. The participating artists and the works they presented at this exhibition illustrate this radical shift and underscore Restany’s ongoing involvement with the avant-garde art scene in Buenos Aires. He wrote an essay about Nicolás García Uriburu’s coloring of the Grand Canal in Venice in 1968 (see GT-264 [doc. no. 1476483]).