“Antonio Berni: Juanito and Ramona”

Curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Marcelo Pacheco

Remarkably, given the longstanding ubiquity of Antonio Berni’s work in his home country of Argentina, “Juanito and Ramona” will be the artist’s first major international exhibition. This show of 115 works will concentrate on Berni’s iconic characters Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel, archetypes of the villas miserias of Buenos Aires whom he repeatedly depicted between the early 1950s and the late ’70s in a series of drawings, paintings, and assemblages made of discarded materials. In addition to showing the monster sculptures from the ’60s that further established Berni’s affinity with Nouveau Réalisme, the exhibition will reveal how he used found objects in the service of a figurative response to the political and economic hardships of the period. Catalogue essays by Ramírez, Pacheco, Andrea Giunta, Héctor Olea, and others will tell more of Berni’s international history.

Travels to the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires in late 2014.