La destruccion marta minujin biography

Marta Minujín is born the 30 of January 1943 in San Telmo, neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She comes from a middle-class family, and her parents were really strict. She described herself her childhood as “horrible”. She studied at the national schools of fine arts of Buenos Aires (Escuelas Nacionales de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires).

At the age of sixteen, in 1959, she married an economist, Juan Gómez Sabaini. She will have two children with him. And at the same age, she presented her first exhibition at the Teatro Agón and had a scholarship from the National Arts Foundation, which allowed her to travel to France. She featured in Pablo Curatella Manes y treinta argentinos de la Nueva Generación.

She stayed there two years and was one of the youngest famous Argentinian artists. She went back in Paris in 1962 thanks to an other scholarship and she started to create “happenings” there. La Destrucción was her first one (1963), where she invited various artists to destroy several of her works of art assembled.

Back in Buenos Aires, she continued happenings and performances. In 1964 she won first prize at the national awards of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute with her work ¡Revuelquese y Viva! (Roll Around and Live!). She wondered about the redefinition of art’s purpose and grew more interested in the medium as the message.

Over the next 20 years, she had been part of every avant-garde movement and befriended about everyone in the art world.

Indeed, in 1966 she won the Guggenheim Foundation scholarship that took her to New York. She stayed there in the 70’s and met Andy Warhol, who influenced her discovering the world of Pop Art, she started to satirize consumer culture. She also began, in the same years, psychedelic arts. One of her best-known creations from this period is the Minuphone (1967), where people could enter a telephone booth, dial a number, and be surprised by colours projecting from the glass panels, sounds, and seeing themsel

Argentine artist (born 1943)

Marta Minujín (born 1943) is an Argentineconceptual and performance artist.

Life and work

Marta Minujín was born in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Her father was a Jewish physician and her mother a housewife of Spanish descent. She met a young economist, Juan Carlos Gómez Sabaini, and married him in secret in 1959; the couple had two children. As a student in the National University Art Institute, she first exhibited her work in a 1959 show at the Teatro Agón. A scholarship from the National Arts Foundation allowed her to travel to Paris as one of the young Argentine artists featured in Pablo Curatella Manes and Thirty Argentines of the New Generation, a 1960 exhibit organized by the prominent sculptor and Paris Biennale judge.

While in Paris, Minujín was inspired by the experimental work of the Nouveaux Realistes, and especially their transformation of art into life. In response to this idea, Minujín staged an exhibition in 1962 during which she publicly burned her paintings. Her time in Paris also inspired her to create "livable sculptures," notably La Destrucción, in which she assembled mattresses along the Impasse Roussin, only to invite other avant-garde artists in her entourage, including Christo and Paul-Armand Gette, to destroy the display. This 1963 creation would be one of her first "Happenings" – events as works of arts in themselves; among her hosts during her stay was Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (later President of France).

She earned a National Award in 1964 at Buenos Aires' Torcuato di Tella Institute, where she prepared two happenings: Eróticos en technicolor and the interactive Revuélquese y viva (Roll Around in Bed and Live). Her Cabalgata (Cavalcade) aired on Public Television that year, and involved horses with paint buckets tied to their tails. These displays took her to nearby Montevideo

After attending the National School of Fine Arts, Marta Minujín frequented the studio of informal painter Jorge López Anaya, where she developed her first canvases. As a very young student, in 1961 Minujín travelled to Paris where, with the guidance of her mentor Alberto Greco, she began to develop a participatory vocabulary. From the mid-1960s Minujín became one of the most energetic contributors to the pop art scene in Buenos Aires. In 1964 she won first prize at the yearly national awards of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute with her seminal work ¡Revuelquese y Viva! (Roll Around and Live!, 1964), a construction made of hand-painted mattresses that invited the viewer to release his/her inhibitions and roll within the object/sculpture. Throughout her practice Minujín explores the value of participation in the redefinition of art’s purpose.

Mattress 1962 is one of Marta Minujín’s earliest experiments with the manipulation of mattresses into sculptural interactive forms, which took place in Paris in the early 1960s. The hand-painted colourful objects emerged from an interest in urban debris and found objects. Their malleable quality soon led Minujín to further investigate their participative potential, a pursuit which characterised her oeuvre throughout the decade. La Menesunda 1965 is a project she conceived in collaboration with Rubèn Santantonín, Pablo Suárez, Floreal Amor, Rodolfo Prayon, Leopoldo Maler, David Lamelas and others associated with the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires. One of the most celebrated works of the decade, La Menesunda consisted of a visual itinerary made of sixteen environments: these included a room with a couple in bed, a dental surgery, a walk-in freezer and a beauty salon housed in a structure in the shape of a woman’s head. La Menesunda sought to transform the passive spectator into an active participant. Over 30,000 visitors flocked to see Minujín’s curious environment, seeking to experie

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