Painting in a State of Exception

Although one of Latin America’s most significant postwar art movements, Nueva Figueración has long been overlooked in studies of modern art. In this first comprehensive examination of the movement, Patrick Frank explores the work of four artists at its heart—Ernesto Deira, Rómulo Macció, Luis Felipe Noé, and Jorge de la Vega—to demonstrate the importance of their work in the transnational development of modern art.
These Argentinian painters built on postwar expressionism by working with unprecedented urgency and abandon, combining spontaneous techniques of abstraction with figural subjects. Their works exercised a creative freedom that broke taboos about the role of the artist in society. To show how their works reflect the environment in which they were created, Frank combines analyses of each artist’s paintings with discussions of their social, political, and artistic contexts while revealing their connections to literature, popular culture, and film.