Gazette Drouot logo print

Antonio BERNI

Price Tax incl.:
12000 EUR

Ramona goes to the bulls, 1964 BERNI Antonio (Rosario, Argentina 1905 † 1981 Buenos Aires, Argentina) Original xylography and embossing H970xW590mm. Fine proof on heavyweight vellum, signed in pencil, titled, dated and numbered 20 /25. Plate from the series Ramona Montiel y sus amigos ("Ramona and her friends"). Good margins. Mounted in frame Antonio Berni is one of the most important Argentine artists of the second half of the 20th century. His surrealist-accented work, which won an award at the 1962 Venice Biennale, is inseparable from his political and social commitment. At the end of the 1950s, concerned about the economic crisis in his country and the plight of the poorer classes, Berni invented two folk-inspired characters, to whom he would dedicate major cycles of collages, etchings and photomontages: "Juanito Laguna", a worker's son and child of the Buenos Aires slums, and "Ramona Montiel", a former seamstress from Portègne who became a prostitute, and the subject of the two etchings we present here. The artist's monumental xylographs - for which he won first prize for engraving and drawing at the Venetian Biennale - are striking in more ways than one. Powerfully decorative in effect, they incorporate into the woodblock print clever collages and imprints of objects gleaned from flea markets or the garbage cans of the Argentine capital's suburbs. The direct reuse of these industrial scraps - ropes, jewelry, pieces of fabric, etc. - with which Berni intentionally saturates his compositions, gives substance to his socio-political critique.

Galerie Martinez D
6 bis, rue de Châteaudun
75009 Paris
galeriemartinezd@gmail.com
Tel. +33 1 42 81 41 16