León Ferrari (Buenos Aires, 1920), son of the artist and architect Augusto César Ferrari, began later in life to dedicate himself to visual arts. This allowed him to serve as a bridge between the late-1950s artist generation and the young vanguard of the 1960s. His first works were ceramic sculptures; then, León experimented with wire structures, visual writing, and collages. What stood out from his work were two branches: a political line that strongly condemned military dictatorships, American imperialism, and Catholic Church ideology, as well as an Informalist approach to conceptual drawing or even within the Surrealist tradition. His 1965 object-montage, titled Civilización Occidental y Cristiana [Western Christian Civilization], was censured at the Centro de Artes Visuales del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella [the Torcuato Di Tella Institute’s Visual Arts Center] (see documents 743800, 744085, and 761879). Ferrari participated intensely in the 1960s events of political conceptualism (in particular, at the event Tucumán Arde [Tucumán Is Burning], 1968). In response to the most recent Argentine military dictatorship’s repressive regime (1975-83), he went into exile in Brazil, where he explored a variety of ideas, such as formalism and the reproducibility of a work, as well as the spatial relationship between sculpture and music (see documents 743960, 744392, and 743870, among others). Since 1984, he has exhibited again in Buenos Aires, where Ferrari again established himself definitely.
Between December of 1961 and April of 1962, Ferrari lived in Milan and, due to family ties—his father was an Italian painter and architect who lived in Buenos Aires—Italy had always been a prospect as a place for him to live. This document relates to León Ferrari’s stay in Italy, which led to the apex of his connection with wire sculptures, one of the aspects of his production of most formal relevance. It also notes the artistic networks that Ferrari was beginning to establish, before the growing politicization of his artistic practice. Both artists, Lucio Fontana and Mario Pucciarelli, appear in the exhibition catalogue, among others.
