BRIZZI Ary

Avellaneda, Argentina, May 11, 1930
December 29, 2014

Ary BRIZZI

untitled, 1964

Painted metal
7 1/16 x 23 5/8 in. (18 x 60 cm.)

Madí– One of the spin-offs of the group that published the magazine Arturo, along with the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención. The movement was founded among others by Carmelo Arden Quin, Gyula Kosice, Rhod Rothfuss and Martín Blaszko, with an exhibition at the Van Riel Gallery (Buenos Aires) and with the launch of the Madí Manifesto (1946). They intended to overcome the lack of universality in concrete art by creating eternal objects with an absolute value, not just through the visual arts but also through music, dance and other art forms. A dispute among its leaders triggered a rift within the movement: Arden Quin went on to pursue further the spread of Madí art from Paris, while Kosice did the same around the Río de la Plata and published the magazine Arte Madí Universal (Universal Madí Art). Artists such as Antonio Llorens and Volf Roitman were also involved in the movement.

Ary Brizzi pursued his education at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Belgrano and the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Ernesto de la Crcova, where he received his professional degree in 1951. He worked first in graphic design and decoration, and his early drawings and watercolors were centered on the human figure. By the time he presented his first solo exhibition at the gallery Gente de Arte (Avellaneda, 1958), he had developed an abstract style of rigorous geometry that was compatible with the Mad movement and the Asociacin Arte Concreto-Invencin. Brizzi became a major figure in among the second generation of Argentine abstract-geometric artists. In 1959, he was responsible for the design of the Argentine pavilion in the III World Trade Fair in New York.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Brizzi dabbled in sculpture. His interest in luminosity and transparencies led him to produce works with aluminum and Plexiglas that sometimes combined enamel or were animated with engines or neon lights. When he returned to two-dimensional art, he abandoned oil paint which he had worked with in his previously. He continued to develop his abstract-geometric work, using acrylic paint and experimented with alternative means of support such as metal. The dynamism explored in his three-dimensional work influenced his new pictorial production, which was very close to Kinetic Op Art. Towards the end of the decade, Brizzi made a series of works using the multiplication of lines as the generating source of the image and its forms. The lines, cleverly organized with gradations of color, produced false revolving or displacing movements that gave the works a characteristic dynamism.

Between 1972 and 1973, Brizzi belonged to the Centro de Investigaciones en Comunicacin Masiva y Tecnologa (Buenos Aires). Also in 1972, he began his educational career, teaching until 1995 at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredn (Buenos Aires). In 1976, he received the Great Honor Prize of Painting at the Salon Nacional de Artes Plsticas. Since then, Brizzi has continued his artistic experimentation, which has been developed from the theories of Ignacio Pirovano and the Grupo Arte Generativo.