Malba Pays Tribute to Luis Felipe Noé with Little-Known Works

The Genesis of the Big Bang: Malba Pays Tribute to Luis Felipe Noé with Little-Known Works
In the most intimate room of the Malba Museum, a chapel, as its artistic director Rodrigo Moura describes it, and behind an enlarged photograph of Luis Felipe Noé in his studio in 1960—a portrait by photographer Sameer Makarius—are five works of his that have been seen very rarely and are essential to understanding his extensive career.

In the photo, Noé is barely 27 years old and far from understanding the place he will occupy in the history of contemporary art in our country, granted thanks to his disruptive outlook, his dissatisfaction with obeying any established canon, and his generous spirit with colleagues, friends, and artists of other generations.
Tribute to Yuyo

This tribute, sponsored by Malba and the Noé Foundation, brings the public closer to the creative power of this complex and complete artist, through these works he created between 1962 and 1965, a central period and the genesis of the Big Bang. Although he worked tirelessly for seven decades and until his 90th birthday, this is where the beginning of the...

In 1960, Rafael Sqirru, director of the brand-new Museum of Modern Art, presented the First International Exhibition of Modern Art in Argentina, which included works by the young Noé alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Antoni Tàpies, Candido Portinari, and Lygia Clark, as well as many other local artists of the new generation. The internationalization of art from our continent was on the agenda.

Two years later, the Bonino gallery, one of the most solid and pioneering of its time, creator of an ambitious plan that included locations in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and New York, organized an exhibition in Brazil that contributed to the dialogue between the regions and the avant-garde movements that were gaining ground. Artists such as Antonio Díaz and Rubens Gerchman said, "Worship Noah because he's dirty," referring to his ability to recover the strength of materiality and pictorial destruction, as Malba's chief curator, Marita García, explains.

During that decade, Noé became a father, taking important steps after his first exhibition at the Witcomb Gallery in 1959, where he befriended Jorge de la Vega and Alberto Greco, with whom he shared visions surrounding the idea of dismantling art, and Romulo Macció, who also worked in the studio portrayed by Makarius, on Avenida Independencia in the heart of the San Juan neighborhood.
Friends, Witnesses, and Accomplices

They were friends, witnesses, and creative accomplices, something demonstrated in the exhibition "Otra Figuración" (Another Figuration), which they presented at the Salón Peuser in 1961 and which would give rise to the New Figuration group. Noé, de la Vega, and Macció joined forces with Ernesto Deira to create a proposal that sought to transcend abstraction and figuration, placing humankind at the center of issues, not as representation but as presence, and inviting us to see the world through different eyes.

On that occasion, Makarius and Carolina Muchnik were also invited, although the group would ultimately be made up of the four of them, who worked side by side for four years, even after they went into exile in Paris.

In Noé's work, the material charge, the crisis of the pictorial object, and the notion of the divided painting or broken vision began to emerge, in addition to gestures of chaos, violence, and the explosion of the very core of art. As Marita García emphasizes, both he and the other members of the group decided to return and invest in their country, a decision that bore fruit with exhibitions they held together at Bonino, Lirolay, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and their participation in the Di Tella Prize. The rupture of painting was well received.
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