Macció, Rómulo (1931–)

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Macció, Rómulo (1931–)

Rómulo Macció (b. 24 March 1931), Argentine artist. Born in Buenos Aires, Macció was trained as a graphic designer and worked as an illustrator in advertising agencies. He took up painting in 1956, joining the New Figuration group in 1961. His early work consisted of paintings of anthropomorphic fragments, halfway between abstraction and figuration. After 1964 he began to paint distorted figures in expressionistic and surrealistic styles. He consciously sought to generate visual and thematic contradictions, such as the overlapping of planar and volumetric structures and the coexistence of two different subjects in the same painting. In 1967 he won the International Di Tella Prize. A rational and orderly composition characterized his paintings of the mid-1970s, although surreal traits remained present in melancholic portraits of lonely figures, often self-portraits (Self-Portrait with Easel, 1976; At Seven O'Clock in Highbury Place, 1976). In the late 1970s, he painted human figures as stylized silhouettes with spiritual and mystical connotations (Amalfi, 1980; Adriatic, 1979). Macció's tendency to expressionism became more evident in the 1980s (Castel Sant' Angelo, 1980). His most recent paintings are views from his atelier and subjects with some classical mythological overtones. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1988 and exhibited in Paris, Milan, and Rome in 1991. In 1996, he had an exhibition at Mexico City's Museo Cuevas. He also exhibited twice in Buenos Aires in the late 1990s: at the Fundación PROA in 1997, and the Centro Cultural Recoleta in 1999. In March 2007, he had a major exhibition at Mexico City's Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gilbert Chase, Contemporary Art in Latin America (1970), pp. 152-153.

Rómulo Macció, Rómulo Macció: Selected Paintings, 1963–1980, translated by Kenneth Parkin (1980).

Félix Angel, "The Latin American Presence," in The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970, by Luis R. Cancel et al. (1988), p. 259.

Miguel Briante et al., Nueva Figuración: 1961–1991 (1991); p. 59.