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.
In 1963, under the auspices of Lucio Fontana, Vanna Nicolotti (1929–2020) began creating three-dimensional pieces that explored a new reality of space, producing works that consisted of superimposing several layers of material and creating various reliefs.
Based on the book by Jean Labbens, Le Quart Monde. La condition sous-prolétarienne (The Fourth World: The Sub-Proletarian Condition, 1969), in which the author researched populations who were marginalized by industrial technocracy on the outskirts of Paris, Nicolotti created the graphic series Estructuras del Cuarto Mundo. In this series, the artist used paper as part of an engraving process; that is, she embossed regular reliefs on the white surface to create a reticular surface. These grids of reliefs/structures were presented as a means of exploring the idea of segregation, exclusion, and as suggested in the title mentioned above, suffering of the so-called “Fourth World”—the urban, invisible underclass that is relegated to the suburbs in the industrialized world and excluded from any sort of institutional framework.
The works in the series Estructuras del Cuarto Mundo were exhibited at the CAYC in Buenos Aires (GT-551; doc. no. 1477162) in 1975 and, subsequently, at the Museo Genaro Pérez in the city of Córdoba, Argentina.
