Argentine Painting

Argentine painting refers to the entire pictorial production produced in Argentina over time. Like its sculpture, Argentine painting draws on innovative styles with European and Amerindian influences.

The third decade of the 20th century represented a fundamental stage in the development of painting, with major events related to new aesthetic orientations taking place. For this reason, the period between 1920 and 1930 is considered the formative period of modern Argentine painting, with exponents such as Antonio Berni, Gyula Kosice—founder of the Madí Movement, the New Argentine Figuration movement—Raúl Soldi, and León Ferrari; and exponents of popular painting such as Florencio Molina Campos and Benito Quinquela Martín.

Prehistory
Throughout the northern half of Santa Cruz province, painted hands have been found on rock faces next to overhangs that protected Paleolithic hunters who stalked their prey from there between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago. The technique involved placing the hand pre-colored with red, white, black, or blue paint, derived from colored earth and colorful fruits. The hand was placed against the wall and the coloring liquid was spat out from the mouth, dispersing and pulverizing like a spray can. The location where the hand was found appears with the colors of the original rock, while the surrounding surface appears colored, highlighting the perfectly separated fingers.

By far, the site with the largest stretches of rock covered by hands is the so-called Cave of the Hands, in the Pinturas River canyon, in the northeast of Santa Cruz province. In reality, it is simply a series of overhangs. It is considered one of the masterpieces of Paleolithic painting in Argentina and has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

Another important pictorial record of prehistory is located in northern Córdoba and constitutes one of the pictographic testimonies with the highest image density in the world, with more than 35,000 pictographs located on the Colorado, Veladero, Intihuasi, and Desmonte hills.

Petroglyphs exist along all the foothills of the Andes Mountains up to the Strait of Magellan. Today they can be found in Yavi, very close to Bolivia, passing through the north-central provinces such as Catamarca, those in the center such as Córdoba,[5] northern Patagonia, as in the case of Victoria Island, in Lake Nahuel Huapi, and as far north as the Strait of Magellan.
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