Luis Camnitzer is included in the group exhibition Porter-Camnitzer. Los años del New York Graphic Workshop at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, on view from April 29–August 31, 2025.
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes' press release follows:
The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes opens the exhibition "Porter-Camnitzer. The Years of the New York Graphic Workshop" on Tuesday, April 29, at 7:00 p.m. This exhibition, which uses graphic works and installations to recreate a key period in the careers of Argentine artist Liliana Porter and Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer, essential figures in Latin American conceptual art.
“Porter and Camnitzer make communication with the public a central axis of their proposals,” says Andrés Duprat, director of the Bellas Artes Museum. “Camnitzer works with the image-based thinking that emerges from the visitor themselves when reading the words printed and pasted in the gallery. Porter's works encapsulate a poetic gesture that proceeds like a mise-en-abyme: he prints wrinkles on previously crumpled papers, which he then wrinkles again, and with these wrinkles, he also sets the mood of the Museum's spaces,” he explains.
Curated by specialist Silvia Dolinko, the temporary exhibition is being held in collaboration with Chile's National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA), which presented a revision of the artists' original exhibition held in the same space in 1969 between October 2024 and February 2025, at the invitation of the artist and then director of the institution, Nemesio Antúnez.
For the Argentine edition of the exhibition, two sections are added: one that explores in greater depth the artists' participation in the "Experiencias 69" exhibition at the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires that same year, and another that brings together prints produced by colleagues such as Marta Minujín and Luis Felipe Noé, among others, with whom they interacted in the United States.
At the end of 1964, Porter and Camnitzer, along with Venezuelan José Guillermo Castillo, created the New York Graphic Workshop (NYGW), which operated until 1970. From that workshop, they rethought their artistic production in conceptual terms, experimented with expanded variables of the printed work, reflected on the notion of multiple objects, and published their own prints and those of other artists.
“Positioned between institutional and disciplinary critique, they brought into play innovative strategies for the realization and circulation of the individual works they produced within the framework of the group project. As young people based in New York, the inclusion of their work in the Latin American circuit was a tactical objective and a platform for visibility,” explains Dolinko.
In addition to organizing NYGW exhibitions in Mexico City, Caracas, and Montevideo, in 1969 Porter and Camnitzer—without Castillo's participation—exhibited at the MNBA in Santiago, Chile, and the Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires. They intervened in these spaces with prints, installations, and mail-order exhibitions, unique graphic proposals with a strong conceptual bent.
"Although these presentations took place in some of the main Latin American institutions, their impact at the time was very limited, and over time, they fell outside the canonical narrative of 20th-century art. Today, however, these productions are considered fundamental pieces of their careers and of contemporary art," the curator states.
"The tour highlights Porter and Camnitzer's concerns regarding the poetics, politics, resources, and meanings of the image present in that early work, and which, with remarkable coherence, continue in their creative pursuits to this day," Dolinko maintains.
Porter's prints from her personal collection, the Bellas Artes collection, and other institutions will be on display, as well as reconstructions of her site-specific installations created in 1969, such as "Shadows" and the iconic "Wrinkles" series. Similar to the original exhibition in Chile, the artist also playfully intervenes in the sculptures on the ground and first floors of the Bellas Artes with crumpled printed papers.
Among Camnitzer's installations on display is "Living Dining Room," a pivotal work in his artistic career and exhibited for the first time in Buenos Aires. Using words that refer to elements of that domestic setting, pasted on the floor and walls of the room, this piece invites the visitor to construct a mental and spatial journey.
Also on display in the gallery is "Massacre of Puerto Montt," created in Chile in 1969 and currently considered one of the key works of Latin American conceptualism. This installation denounces the murder of a group of peasants—also known as the "Pampa Irigoin Massacre"—at the hands of Chilean police officers in March of that same year, which Camnitzer "reconstructs" conceptually with words and dotted lines.
The exhibition also includes prints produced at NYGW by Noé, Minujín, Jorge de la Vega, Marcelo Bonevardi and Margarita Galetar (Porter's mother), as well as photographs, posters, publications and other graphic pieces – such as the 1966 New York Graphic Workshop Manifesto – that document the experimental spirit that emerged in this space.
“In the works of Porter and Camnitzer, there is a call to embrace the paradox that dwells in artistic representation, to decode, from an active position, ideas and processes,” Duprat opines. “Their installations and settings are dominated by a powerful impression, the surprise at a gesture that is both simple and multifaceted, the admiration for that form of intellectual acuity that manages to move,” he adds.
“Porter-Camnitzer: The Years of the New York Graphic Workshop” is on view until August 31, 2025, in rooms 37 to 40 on the first floor, Tuesday through Friday, from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. (last admission), and Saturday and Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.
This text has been translated into English.