DAVID LAMELAS: SOME NOTES ON HIS OWN HISTORY AND ON ARGENTINEAN ART HISTORY

drawing of the installation of 'Connection of three spaces' also known as 'Extension of a limited spatial volume' made in 1966 at the Instituto di Tella in Buenos Aires, revisited by David Lamelas in his current exhibition at Bloomberg Space in London



drawing of one of David Lamelas very early works in his first solo show at the Galeria Lirolay in Buenos Aires in 1964. Three large-scale pop paintings of tango singer Carlos Gardel, the paintings were fragmented in parts and included paint drippings. As Lamelas himself noted about the exhibition "The theme isn't painting but the questioning of popular myth", quote in 'Listen, here, now!: Argentine art of the 1960s: writings of the avant-garde' edited by Inés Katzenstein, MOMA, NY, 2004, p. 339




A brief an selected history of Argentinean art.


David Lamelas
David Lamelas was born in Buenos Aires in 1946, he lives and works in Los Angeles and Buenos Aires. Lamelas studied at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes [National Fine Arts Academy] in Buenos Aires. During the 1960s he was one of the leaders of the vanguard movement that was spawned at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella. In 1968 he traveled to London and studied at St. Martin’s School of Arts with a British Council grant. In 1978 he moved to Los Angeles; in 1988 he took up residence in New York and from 1991 to 1997 divided his time between New York and Brussels. In 1998 and 1999 he lived in Berlin, and since 1999 has been dividing his time between Los Angeles, Paris and New York.

He was the Argentinean representative at the 9th Sao Paulo Biennial (1967), where he received the Sao Paulo Biennial Award for his installation; he also represented Argentina at the 34th Venice Biennial (1968). In 1972 he took part in Documenta 5, Kassel. A retrospective exhibition of his work, David Lamelas: A New Refutation of Time, was shown at Rotterdam’s Witte de With and Munich’s Kunstyerein in 1997. He received a Guggenheim grant in 1993, and in 1997 was awarded another by the German Academic Exchange Service, (DAAD), Germany. In 2001, London’s Royal College of Arts organized a symposium on his work.

Lamelas has participated in numerous individual and collective exhibitions, among them an anthological exhibition, David Lamelas: Extranjero, Foreigner, Étranger, Auslander, held in 2005 at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City. Others include: America, the Bride of the Sun: 500 years of Latin America and the Low Countries, Antwerp (1992); Reconsidering the Object of Art 1965-75, Los Angeles (1995); Global Conceptualism - Points of Origin 1950s-1980s; MIT List Visual Arts Centre, Cambridge, and Bronx Museum of Art, New York (2000); Live in your Head, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2000); Beyond Geometry, Experiments in Form, 1940s-1970s, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2002), and Behind the Facts. Interfunktionen 1968-1975, Fundación Joan Miró, Barcelona (2003).

David Lamelas' work can currently be seen at his exhibition in Bloomberg Space
http://www.bloombergspace.com/archive/comma36_essay.html

For more of David's work, visit
http://www.spruethmagers.com/artists/david_lamelas
and
http://www.janmot.com/david_lamelas/index.php