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 20 artistas brasileños sought to present an overview of a number of artists working in the neighboring country of Brazil. The artists were selected by Irma Arestizábal (1940–2009), who was a curator of semi-official events, in this case associated with the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations. This newsletter reports that, after the exhibition had been presented at the CAYC (GT-645; doc. no. 1477208), it was installed at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bahía Blanca.
The curator and art historian Irma Arestizábal, who was born in Argentina, specialized in contemporary Latin American art. She was the curator at the Departamento de Exibições Temporais del Museu de Arte Moderna do Río de Janeiro from 1975 to 1977. That institution and its exhibition space played an important part in the cultural relations between the two countries. In the catalogue essay, Arestizábal notes how difficult it is to get a clear and complete overview of the art in a particular country, in this case such a versatile one as Brazil, especially when its artists work in a broad range of techniques. Although the participating artists had produced works in a variety of different disciplines (painting, sculpture, photography, and video), Arestizábal chose to build the exhibition around prints that explored the many possibilities of that particular medium.
