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 list of artists—and the explanation that these are graphic works—helps us to identify the event in question as one of the many iterations of the traveling exhibition whose first version was called Gráficos argentinos ‘74 (GT-357; doc. no. 1476511) and was shown at the Illinois Bell Telephone Company’s exhibition rooms in Chicago in early 1974. It was later presented as Gráficos rioplatenses (1976) (GT-660; doc. no. 1477370) and included participants from other parts of the continent. This reworking of the titles of traveling exhibitions was one of the CAYC’s regular strategies as it sought to position Argentinean and Latin American art on the international stage.
Some of the artists mentioned on this occasion had been regular participants in the center’s activities since its very early days, such as Juan Carlos Romero, Horacio Zabala, Luis Fernando Benedit (members of the Grupo de los Trece), and Edgardo A. Vigo. Others became involved in the mid-1970s, such as Pablo Obelar, Sergio Camporeale, Delia Cugat, and Daniel Zelaya, who were members of the Grabas group.
These new inclusions indicate the CAYC’s openness to figurative trends (realism, Neo-Surrealism, and Photorealism, among others) that were appearing at that time at major international exhibitions such as documenta 5 Kassel (1972) and the Paris Biennial (1971). Events of that nature were soon matched in Argentina, as in the Panorama de la pintura argentina joven (1971), organized 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 presented at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.
It is interesting to note the similarity of the names of the CAYC in Buenos Aires and the art and communication institute that hosted the exhibition in Liechtenstein. This underscores the rising popularity of communication theories at a global level since the 1960s.
