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 artist Klaus Groh (b. 1936), also a musician and writer, was born in Neisse (now Poland). He studied pedagogy and art history in Oldenburg, Germany. In the mid-1960s he was living in San Francisco working on his doctoral thesis on Dadaism. While in the United States he encountered the first stirrings of mail art. By the end of the 1960s he had become one of the main figures in the discipline, connecting artists from Western, Central, and Eastern Europe during the time of the Cold War. From 1971 to 2006, Groh was operating at an international level with the Micro Hall Art Center and the Kleinkunstbühne Literaturium; he ran the International Artists Cooperation (IAC) organization from 1969 to 1990, where he was the editor of the newsletter, the “IAC-INFO,” which was the forerunner to the mail art network that operated throughout that vast region.
Groh collaborated frequently with the CAYC. He took part in Arte de Sistemas (1971) (GT- 55; doc. no. 1476293) and Arte de Sistemas II (Buenos Aires, September 1972) (GT-163; doc. no. 1476343), both of which took place at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires. He also took part in Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano at the Museo Emilio Caraffa in Córdoba, Argentina, (1972) (GT-183, GT-183-I, GT-183-II; doc. no. 1476354); and in that exhibition’s European tour in 1973, at the Amadís gallery in Madrid (GT-205, GT-205-II, GT-205-III; doc. no. 1476421) and the Współczesna gallery in Warsaw (GT-270-A, GT-270-A-I; doc. no. 1476487). He also sponsored a presentation of that exhibition at the above-mentioned IAC while he was the organization’s director (GT-211; doc. no. 1476422). Groh also took part in the group exhibition of works by artists associated with the Dutch Agora Studio that was presented at the CAYC in Buenos Aires in October 1975 (GT-547; doc. no. 1476880).
